MeitY to establish Quantum Computing Applications Lab in collaboration with AWS

In an initiative to apply quantum computing to advance India's science and technology development initiatives and bolster the economy, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in collaboration with AWS will establish a Quantum Computing Applications Lab in the country.

Quantum computing is an emerging field harnessing the laws of quantum mechanics to build powerful tools to process information and has the potential to solve computational problems that are beyond the reach of classical computers. This new lab will help accelerate quantum computing-led research and development and enable new scientific discoveries. It will also provide quantum computing as a service to the government ministries and departments, researchers, scientists, academia, and developers, to enable advances in areas such as manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and aerospace engineering. It will identify quantum computing problem statements for experimentation from among Central and State Governments, Research Institutions, and Academia. It will work with subject matter experts from the government sector to define the problem statements, and make them public, inviting applications from researchers, academia, and organizations to address them. The Lab will then provide select applicants with access to quantum computing hardware, simulators, and programming tools, on-demand and at no cost, via Amazon Braket, that enables scientists and developers to build algorithms, conduct advanced simulations, and run experiments. Amazon Braket provides a development environment to enable users to explore and design quantum algorithms, test and troubleshoot them on simulated quantum computers, and run them on different quantum hardware technologies.

"India has a rich legacy in science, technology, and innovation. We believe that India's path forward will be driven by achieving world-class scientific solutions. Enabling our scientific community with advanced technologies plays a key role towards scientific advancements and learning," said Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY.

While it is said to be the world's first quantum computing applications lab on AWS to support a national government's mission to drive innovation, the initiative will provide scientific, academic, and developer communities access to a quantum computing development environment aligned with the government's science and technology priorities. AWS will provide hosting with technical and programmatic support for the Lab. Max Peterson, Vice President, International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services, Inc. said, "by supporting the MeitY Quantum Computing Applications Lab, we aim to make quantum computing available to more scientists, researchers, developers and organisations, enabling them to access and experiment with the technology, and explore the practical applications of quantum algorithms."

The MeitY Quantum Computing Applications Lab will help government bodies and the scientific community to identify problems and opportunities rapidly, and test real-world challenges through experiments and prototypes in a low-risk environment. Outcomes from these experiments will help researchers evolve the problem statements, proofs-of-concept, and prototypes that will lead to the development of new applications, models, and frameworks in quantum computing.

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