It’s no secret that the best way to achieve maximum performance from a quantum system is to establish a very tight integration between the hardware and software stacks. This allows the software to take advantage of all the idiosyncrasies in the hardware to obtain every ounce of performance that it can. And achieving this maximum performance is surely needed as the industry races to achieve systems that can provide a Quantum Advantage.
To achieve this, Horizon Quantum Computing is partnering with Rigetti Computing and Quantum Machines to create its own quantum testbed this will give it full control over both hardware and software stacks. They will be integrating their Triple Alpha quantum software platform along with Rigett’s 9-qubit Novera QPU and Quantum Machines OPX1000 quantum control platform to create a testbed system that will be set up in early 2025 at Horizon’s headquarters in Singapore.
A key objective of this testbed is to have a hybrid classical/quantum system that can process the classical portions of the algorithms in parallel with the quantum portions on the quantum processor and do it with low latencies. By having the full system under their control, Horizon believes they can do this a lot better than third party cloud systems which may have issues such as queueing delays and longer latency communications between the classical and quantum processors.
Horizon’s Triple Alpha software facilitates this because it includes a higher level language called Helium that can be thought of as a quantum version of BASIC. Additionally, a library of classical subroutines written in C or C++ which can be converted to run on qubits instead of bits will also be available. Horizon’s programming language can incorporate both classical and quantum instructions within the same program and the software will ensure that execution is performed on the right processor. Horizon’s lower level language is called Hydrogen which will be able to execute low level operations on the hardware with the help of the OPX1000.
Although the Triple Alpha/Novera/OPX1000 configuration will be the first system that Horizon will be testing its tight integration quantum approach, it will certainly not be the last. With this system the company expects to learn a lot about operating a quantum system in a production environment and they will use that experience to move on to other more powerful systems than this first one.
Horizon has posted a news release announcing this project that can be accessed on their website here.
April 18, 2024
