Amazon Braket is Now Supporting OpenQASM Programs

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it is now supporting the OpenQASM quantum assembly on all the gate-based quantum processors currently in the Amazon Braket Service. These include the processors from IonQ, Oxford Quantum Circuits, and Rigetti. However, this would not include the D-Wave quantum annealer since that is not a gate-based processor. OpenQASM is also supported by IBM. So, users will have the ability to write a single program and run it on different machines to compare the results. The compatibility is achieved using backend compilers for each of the machines that will automatically translate the OpenQASM programs to the native gate set available in the target machine. This announcement is not too surprising to us since we previously wrote last September that a Technical Steering Committee had been set up to guide OpenQASM development and the initial members included IBM, AWS, Microsoft, and the University of Innsbruck. A blog article from AWS announcing this support can be found here.

March 7, 2022