Three Weeks On, the Million-Qubit Machine Faces Its First Real Users

SINGAPORE — When the Singapore Institute ran a million-qubit processor across the Q-Net backbone on 14 September, the achievement was the headline. Three weeks later, the story is the queue. The Institute has opened a first tranche of run-time to outside researchers, and the applications — 640 at last count, for roughly forty available slots this quarter — reveal how narrow the frontier still is. "A demonstration proves it can exist. A schedule proves it is useful, and we are not there yet," said allocation lead Dr. Harun Prasad, who now spends his days rationing hours among climate modelers, materials chemists and cryptographers. Q-Net secures the channel but does not move the computation faster than light; every job still waits its physical turn. The Institute says most applicants will be turned away this year. For the forty who get in, the machine is less a marvel than a stopwatch — and the clock, everyone agrees, is the scarcest thing in the building.