Aliro Quantum, a quantum software company spun out of spun out of Harvard’s Quantum Information Science Lab in 2019, has introduced its first two products. The first is called Aliro Q.Compute (AQC) and is a development platform that will take quantum programs written in QASM, pyQuil, or other quantum languages and optimize them to run on different hardware platforms. Aliro currently supports hardware from IBM, Honeywell, Rigetti, AQT, and they are working to add others. The software will create noise models for the various hardware platforms and then develop optimizations a both the gate level and the pulse level to run a user’s program with the best performance and accuracy. By supporting multiple hardware backends, the Aliro software can also guide a user to select the best hardware platform for their particular problem.

The second software product is called Aliro Q.Network (AQN) is quite unique.  It is a quantum network simulator that allows one to design and configure a quantum network. The AQN allows a user to select a topology, look at component fidelities, configure devices, simulate noise sources, compare protocols, and more.  The output of the AQN will provide the user with estimates of the network performance, resources estimates, and cost. Although there are a lot of quantum software companies out there, we do not know of anyone that is tackling the quantum networking issues in the way that Aliro is.

When many people think about a quantum internet, they often think of QKD networks which allow one to send and receive data between two classical computers in a way that cannot be broken with a future large quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm.  However, one trend we see coming to quantum computing is the notion of using multiprocessing architectures to solve much larger quantum programs.  Rather than hardware companies developing a single individual processor that contains 1 million qubits, we expect that in a few years, some of them will be providing multiprocessing systems that will have perhaps a thousand or so qubits in a single processor, but then replicate those processors 100 or more times to create systems with 10’s of thousands or 100’s of thousands of qubits.  The individual processors will be networked with a form of quantum internet that will exchange entangled photons with the other processors and be programmed together to run a much larger quantum application program. Although the multiprocessors may be located in different cities, they may also be clustered together within a quantum data center with an average node-to-node distance of 1 or 2 meters.

Aliro has received grants from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and is working with them on various use cases. Both software programs are currently in beta test with selected customers.  For more details about Aliro’s products, you can view the Aliro Q.Compute web page here, the Aliro Q.Network web page here, a video demo of Aliro Q.Compute here and the press announcement for both products here.

October 7, 2020

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