HQS Quantum Simulations launches an overhauled quantum circuit representation library.
Powered by a new engine dubbed roqoqo and built with Rust, the library will provide an efficient foundation for research workflows.
Karlsruhe, 08.07.21. HQS Quantum Simulations announced today the release of roqoqo, a new engine for the qoqo library, which empowers developers to create, process and serialize quantum circuits in an efficient manner and provides a thin runtime for quantum measurements. The roqoqo project also includes a set of optional backends interfacing to other quantum toolkits, simulators and quantum hardware. Roqoqo becomes the new basis of qoqo, whose previous quantum circuit engine was written in Python. Python is now used to interface with the roqoqo toolkit.
Quantum computing is a new computing paradigm, whereby problems that cannot be solved using classical computing become tractable when utilizing quantum effects such as superposition and entanglement. This method has many potential applications in materials and chemical science, where most calculations are beyond the capability of current supercomputers, with, notably, the possibility of using quantum algorithms to find a new and more efficient chemical reaction to replace the Haber-Bosch process, which currently accounts for up to 1% of the world’s energy consumption.
The qoqo toolkit was designed from the ground up with two goals in mind: Efficient serialization of quantum programs including measurement inputs and high performance handling of quantum circuits containing symbolic variables, including parameter replacement. Complete serialization allows using qoqo for quantum program exchange with minimal information overhead, meeting commercial IP compliance rules. Efficient handling of large circuits lets qoqo scale up efficiently to support future quantum hardware with hundreds or thousands of qubits.
“The required communication between conventional and quantum hardware is very challenging,” said Sebastian Zanker, CTO of HQS Quantum Simulations. “While exchanging the quantum circuits is usually standardized, the post-processing of outputs from a quantum computer is typically left to the user. Qoqo can help with that by providing a way to seralize the post-processing of the output of the quantum computer”
Porting central parts of qoqo from Python to Rust allows for leveraging the outstanding qualities of the Rust system level programming language, combining high performance with memory safety, to further improve qoqos strengths. Releasing the rust parts as the standalone roqoqo crate also allows developers to use this open source toolkit directly in a Rust project.
The release has improved many functions, most of all serialization using the rust serde library, that can support many serialization formats. Other major changes also come with the release, such as support for non-linear expectation values, streamlined measurement inputs, as well as many other fundamental design alterations. The aim of the library is to provide academic researchers and industry R&D with tools that allow them to efficiently create quantum circuits and test them with different backends, so that they may be ready to implement quantum solutions when industry-ready quantum computers hit the markets.
“To make full use of the speedups quantum computing promises , quantum computers need to be paired with high performance computing on the classical side. We think roqoqo is a very useful tool for this, allowing us to work with quantum circuits in performance optimized Rust programs,“ said Nicolas Vogt, project leader for qoqo.
The library is already used in multiple projects, and is now available to the general public through GitHub, lengthening the list of libraries created by HQS Quantum Simulations, either for quantum or conventional computers.
More technical information can be found on the GitHub release page.
About HQS Quantum Simulations
Founded in 2017 by physicists with a background in theoretical quantum computing and decoherence, HQS Quantum Simulations develops software simulating quantum systems for conventional and quantum computers, with the mission to provide companies and researchers with the ability to effortlessly switch their simulation workflow to quantum computers once they are available.
For more information, contact: press@quantumsimulations.de