Use quantum computers over the cloud with ACQUA

Making a world that is "Quantum Ready" requires more researchers exploring the applications of quantum computing and potential quantum advantage, and working with real quantum computers just got easier for experts in chemistry, artificial intelligence and optimization thanks to IBM. Building on QISKit, the open source quantum information science kit for software development, IBM has released ACQUA - Algorithms andCircuits for QUantum Applications. This open source software allows classical computer applications to send complex operations to be run on quantum computers, over the cloud.
 
At the lowest level is the hardware where the qubits sit at the very cold temperature of 15 mK. The qubits receive microwave pulse signals for a calculation, which have been translated and converted from OpenQASM, IBM Q’s low-level assembly language, by QISKit. Users of the free IBM Q Experience 16 qubit system can write programs directly in OpenQASM, but it’s easier to use libraries in higher level languages. That’s where QISKit comes in. It’s a front-end interface that works with Python.
 
QISKit alone requires developer skills. Running experiments on the IBM Q Experience means understanding how to write a program, or using someone else’s program such as those in QISKit’s github repository. So far, this approach has succeeded: More than 85,000 users have run more than four million experiments and published 80 research papers based on experiments run on the system. But we were missing the contributions of domain experts – until QISKit ACQUA.

QISKit ACQUA is a library of quantum algorithms that accomplishes two things:

It allows domain experts unfamiliar with quantum computing to access to IBM Q quantum computers via the classical applications they’re used to using, or via individual, existing, domain-specific algorithms.
It also allows researchers and developers to contribute new algorithms to QISKit ACQUA’s open source domain libraries.
 
Beginning with chemistry, artificial intelligence and optimization, experts in these fields can begin to tap into QISKit ACQUA as a new component to the applications they use in their research. They can do all this without fully understanding the complex quantum computation happening at the deeper levels of the software stack, or at the hardware level.
 
QISKit ACQUA Chemistry libraries support classical applications such as Gaussian, PSI4, PySCF and PyQuante. Users can work with one of these apps in ACQUA to run a specific execution on IBM Q quantum hardware or simulators – versus within the classical software – to examine the results a quantum computer produces. The release also includes QISKit ACQUA Artificial Intelligence and QISKit ACQUA Optimization algorithms and will include interfaces to particular domain-specific applications in the near future.
Many working chemists today rely on software packages to do very specific computations related to their particular field of interest. We hope that chemists will look at how QISKit ACQUA can extend the power of their familiar applications into the quantum realm. We’ve made it easy to download and install QISKit ACQUA to start learning and experimenting.
 
Sixteen or twenty of today’s approximate universal qubits do not provide a specific advantage over classical computers just yet. IBM scientists even proved that 49 and 56 qubits can be simulated on supercomputers for particular problems. So, why create this hybrid classical-quantum environment now?

Quantum readiness

Experts can continue using their familiar domain-specific applications, which do much more than measure ground state energy of different molecules that we show in the demo. They can also take advantage of increases in quantum computing’s power as quantum volume improves, and the number of applications grows in QISKit ACQUA’s respective libraries. QISKit ACQUA advances industry-, academic- and research-wide collaboration to prepare for a world where classical and quantum computers work together to better solve computationally complex problems. The future of computing is hybrid and QISKit ACQUA is a big step toward making that a reality.