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.
