Quantum computing cloud platform released in China

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma speaks during the opening ceremony of "The Computing Conference 2017" in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Oct. 11, 2017. The four-day conference kicked off here on Wednesday, attracting guests from 67 countries and regions. (Xinhua/Huang Zongzhi)

A Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) research institute and Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud computing subsidiary, have released a cloud platform for quantum computing.

The platform was announced online by Aliyun and the CAS innovative center for quantum information and quantum physics (Shanghai) at a cloud computing conference Wednesday in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, where Alibaba is based.

The platform will offer users a development and testing environment for cloud-based quantum algorithms.

Pan Jianwei, lead scientist of China's quantum experiments at space scale and a member of the academy, said the platform would help industrialize quantum computing.

"If a classic computer is compared to a bicycle in computation speed, a quantum computer is like a jet," said Pan.

Cooperation between CAS and Aliyun dates back to July 2015, when a quantum computing laboratory was launched. In May 2017, the world's first prototype quantum computer was developed by the laboratory and two Chinese universities.