Inside Amazon Braket's Dragon Cave
Data centers. Whatever.
The Quantum Dragon already knew that Amazon Braket has a garnet, but when he found out that they have an emerald, too, there was no stopping him. He had to go check it out.
It turns out that these aren’t the type of garnets and emeralds a dragon would normally be interested in. In fact, they’re not even on-premises. Nevertheless, he’s not just any dragon. He’s The Quantum Dragon, so he sees value in IQM’s versions as well.
The question is: why should we humans be interested?
Predictable Pricing
IQM Resonance pricing offers some free credits per month, and they can be used for the 54-qubit square lattice IQM Emerald, 20-qubit square lattice IQM Garnet, or 16-qubit star topology IQM Sirius, so it would ill-behoove me not to mention that. But after you consume those credits, pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $0.30 per second. That can be challenging to estimate, because runtimes vary based on shot counts, as well as the selected backend. Premium access is also available at an undisclosed rate.
Amazon Braket pricing, also pay-as-you-go, has a flat $0.30 rate per-task, and then $0.00160 per-shot for IQM Emerald or $0.00145 per-shot for IQM Garnet. You can easily calculate your cost in advance. Also, you can reserve IQM Emerald for $4,000 per hour, or IQM Garnet for $3,000 per hour. And not to be outdone on giving away free usage, check out all of these programs:
AWS Free Tier (new customers)
AWS Activate (startups)
AWS Educate (learners)
AWS Cloud Credit for Research (students, faculty, staff)
AWS Public Sector Cloud Credit for Research (students, faculty, staff)
Access Models
Amazon Braket allows you to execute individual circuits, of course; Braket Direct offers hourly reservations; and Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs gives you fully managed algorithm execution with on-demand priority access. A significant benefit of using the Braket Direct option is that you get free time with service-team experts to prepare for your reservations and make sure you maximize your time with your chosen gemstones… I mean, quantum computers.
IQM Resonance (their platform’s name) doesn’t have most of that.
HPC Integration
Amazon Braket is fully integrated with AWS, so scalable and elastic classical compute is at the ready for your complex workloads.
IQM Resonance doesn’t have that.
More Technologies
Officially, this announcement is about the availability of IQM Emerald, however we all know that Amazon Braket has more than classical compute available. The Quantum Dragon is a well-established fan of QuEra’s “Aquila” neutral atom quantum computer, and you can find it there, too.
It goes without saying that IQM Resonance doesn’t have that.
Conclusion
I haven’t seen The Quantum Dragon since the announcement, so IQM Emerald and IQM Garnet are apparently worthy of your time. I don’t know where he got all the credits from, but dragons can be very persuasive….
Image generated by Google's language model AI.
Figure 1: IQM Emerald processor
Figure 2: The Emerald QPU topology showing a 54-qubit square lattice with tunable couplers