We reported at the end of April about PsiQuantum receiving $940 Million AUD ($620M USD) in funding from the Australian Commonwealth and Queensland Governments to create a 1 million physical qubit error-corrected quantum computer in Brisbane, Australia. And another report, published on the Chicago Sun Times website, describes rumors that PsiQuantum may be considering to build a similar site in the Chicagoland area. Besides all the technical, political, and financial risks that might be associated with these projects another risk is the question of whether a user community will be able to quickly make full use of this computer when it becomes available. If the machine is hard to use or a user community needs a lot of time to understand how to best use it, the return on this investment for these governments won’t be quite so good.
PsiQuantum has been working to mitigate this risks in two ways. First, the company has been working closely with a few early partners to examine how specific applications could be run on their future machine. Organizations they have announced that they have partner with for this include Mitsubishi Chemical, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, DARPA, UK’s Hartree Centre, Mercedes-Benz, Qunasys, and others.
Now, PsiQuantum has introduced two new software tools that can help end users with specifying and representing quantum algorithms and then create resource estimates for them. The first tool, called Quantum Resource Estimation Format (QREF), is an open format for representing fault tolerant quantum algorithms. This format allows quantum programs to be represented by a hierarchical directed acyclic graph. The QREF is built on top of JSON (Java Script Object Notation) which is a human-readable data interchange format.
The second tool is a library called Bartiq which takes input in the form of QREF data and analyzes quantum routines and calculates symbolic expressions to develop quantum resource estimates (QRE). This library will help automated resources estimation tasks which can otherwise be very time-consuming and error-prone if performed manually, particularly when trying to create estimates of fault tolerant quantum algorithms. Bartiq works by taking a collection of subroutines that have associated costs represented by symbolic expressions and compiling them to get a full cost for the whole algorithm.
PsiQuantum will be making these tools open source. QREF is available now while Bartiq is in beta testing with select PsiQuantum partners. The company intends on making it full open source in Q3 2024. In addition, the company is working on another tool named QC Ops which is a framework that incorporates stages of design, development, and operations. More information about QC Ops will be released by PsiQuantum later this year.
For additional information about these software tools, you can access an announcement posted on the PsiQuantum website here. In addition, you can visit a GitHub page for QREF here and another one for Bartiq here.
May 10, 2024