IonQ Makes Its Aria Class Processor Available on Microsoft Azure

The IonQ Aria processor is their fifth generation processor which support approximate two dozen qubits or more using IonQ's ion trap technology. They have been working on the development of this processor for over two years and first mentioned it in a press release in October 2020. Earlier this year, they have made it available for a private beta with select customers such as Hyundai Motors and GE Research, but now they have made it publicly available on the Microsoft Azure Quantum cloud. This is the second IonQ processor available on Azure. The first IonQ processor deployed on Azure was their 11 qubit Harmony system.

A distinguishing feature of the Aria processor is its very high quality qubit performance. IonQ is touting its own qubit quality metric which they call Algorithmic Qubits (#AQ) and note that Aria has achieved a new high in this metric of 23. They also provide some lower level performance metrics as shown in the table below with this data published last month.

IonQ Aria Performance Specifications. Source: IonQ

IonQ is offering premium onboarding, consulting, and technical support for those customers who purchase monthly subscription access to Aria through Azure Quantum. IonQ has also partnered with AWS Braket and Google Cloud to make their earlier Harmony system available through those services. Right now, those two services aren't able to offer access to the Aria system yet, but we would expect that IonQ is making plans to change this in the future.

For additional information on Aria's availability on Microsoft Azure Quantum you can read a press release provided by IonQ here. They have also published two blogs that describe Aria in some more detail and you can view Part 1 of the blogs here and Part 2 here.

August 17, 2022