  As the practical Quantum Computing Platforms (QCPs) rapidly become a reality,
it is desirable to harness their true potential in software applications. Thus
it becomes important to determine the implications of QCPs for software
architecture. In this paper we present the in-depth examination of
state-of-the-art QCPs for identifying all such characteristics of a QCP that
are relevant from software architecture perspective. Lack of a native quantum
operating system, a hard dependency on quantum algorithms, the lower level of
programming abstractions are few, out of many, examples of QCP characteristics
which may affect architecture of quantum software applications. Key
contributions of this paper include identifying: i) The general architecture of
a QCP, ii) The programming model which is typically used when developing
software for a QCP, iii) Architecturally significant characteristics of QCPs
and iv) The impact of these characteristics on various Quality Attributes
(QAs). We show that except performance and scalability, most of the other QAs
(e.g. maintainability, testability, reliability etc.) are adversely affected by
different characteristics of a QCP.
