Cambridge Quantum has made the latest version of its hardware agnostic quantum software development kit TKET (pronounced “ticket”) generally available on an open source basis.
The move comes as the quantum computing industry begins to shift its focus from the race to develop high-qubit systems to the software that will increasingly be needed to program those systems and get them to work on specific problems. to resolve. As recently as last week, during a presentation at Questex’s Sensors Converge event, Christian Bauer, head of the theory group and director of quantum computing for the physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spoke identified software and the global challenge of programming quantum computers as an issue that is now the industry reaching its full potential. Companies such as Classiq and Quantum Machines have also recently highlighted this problem.
“Making all source code available to the community makes integration, modification and issue tracking easier for all users,” Cambridge Quantum said in an email to Fierce Electronics. “Everyone in the quantum software community will now be able to make their own contributions and develop their own extensions to the code base, under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. “
The company added that TKET is compatible with other quantum languages, such as Qiskit, Cirq, Q # and others through plugins.
Cambridge itself looks set to play a bigger role in this development. Last June, Honeywell announced that it would merge its quantum computing business with Cambridge Quantum, a company in which it already had an investment, and would invest an additional $ 270 million to $ 300 million in the resulting spin-off. This agreement is expected to be concluded during the fourth quarter.
Cambridge Quantum CEO Ilyas Khan, CEO of CQ, said in a statement on the availability of open source: By the end of 2021. He said the company’s developer community has experienced a “amazing” growth in the meantime.
In the same statement, Ross Duncan, head of software at CQ, added: “Minimizing the number of gates and running time is very important in the era of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ). TKET combines high-level hardware agnostic optimization for quantum circuits with target-specific compilation passes for the chosen quantum device. This helps quantum computing users to move seamlessly between quantum platforms, while maintaining consistent high performance. Users only need to focus on developing their quantum applications, not rewriting code around the peculiarities of a particular hardware. At the same time, we are helping quantum computing hardware companies ensure that they can get the best performance from their processors. “
RELATED: Powerful Quantum Computer From Honeywell
