IBM Qiskit, used to develop quantum circuits, is being augmented with a Quantum Function Catalog, is also being updated to deliver faster performance to speed application development.
When Qiskit launched in 2017, the Quantum development tool helped learners and explorers, designed for the masters of both the computational application domain and the exotic world of quantum circuits. Now, Qiskit has the performance and functions needed to help seek advantage on utility-scale quantum computers.
Coding a quantum computer with hand built circuits takes time and a rare combination of skills. And this will remain the case for many application domains. But with IBM's new Qiskit Function Catalog, that dynamic is beginning to change. Much like how Nvidia CUDA simplifies coding of GPUs, the new functions begin to abstract the underlying hardware, and accelerate development on quantum. But unlike CUDA libraries, the Qiskit Function Catalog is being built by partners, and should continue to grow as more institutions and companies embrace the concept.
Qiskit Functions take two forms: Circuits and Applications. Circuit functions simplify advances in transpilation, error suppression, and error mitigation to enable utility-grade performance on IBM quantum machine. This allows computational scientists to focus on mapping their problems to circuits, rather than building the pattern for each problem from scratch.
"The immediate future of quantum computing relies heavily on effective error mitigation techniques," said Professor Sabrina Maniscalco, Co-Founder and CEO of Algorithmiq, who announced an error mitigation solution on Qiskit Functions. "Through the power of TEM error mitigation running on IBM quantum hardware, we can push the boundaries of what near-term quantum devices can achieve, bringing us closer to practical and advantageous quantum computations."
Application functions cover higher-level tasks, like exploring algorithms and domain-specific use cases. Enterprise developers and data scientists may not have the background quantum information science knowledge for working with circuits. Application Functions allow users to enter their classical inputs and receive solutions so they can more easily experiment with plugging quantum into their domain-specific workflows.
"We were thrilled to lead the industry as the first ISV to integrate with a major quantum cloud platform when we launched our performance management software natively on IBM Quantum Services last year. Now we take another major step as we bring our performance management and quantum-optimization capabilities to the world's largest quantum developer community through Qiskit Functions. We're grateful to our partners at IBM and excited to help the industry mature through deverticalization alongside our new colleagues," said Michael J. Biercuk, CEO and Founder of Q-CTRL.
In addition to Functions, IBM has dramatically increased the performance of the Qiskit SDK, rewriting the original Python to RUST, which is compiled not interpreted. As such, Qiskit is delivering dramatically faster performance, building the circuits needed to execute on quantum computers in hours instead of the weeks or months required by competitive alternatives.
The most recent version of Qiskit, SDK 1.2, has significantly improved performance, but IBM has more work ahead to complete the transition to Rust, expected to culminate in SDK 2.0 sometime next year.
IBM is on a path to produce commercially available quantum systems that exceed a million qubits by the end of this decade, unleashing a level of computation that is far beyond anything that a traditional or even accelerated computer system can accomplish. To put this into perspective, IBM's latest available quantum processor, called "Heron", has 156 qubits. These quantum systems will work in tandem with traditional computers to solve the unsolvable problems, changing the world as we know it.
But it takes a lot more than innovative hardware to realize IBM's vision. It take solutions that can be programmed into quantum circuits, and IBM continues to enhance its Qiskit software to enable more scientists to develop quantum codes that can run on today's and tomorrow's quantum systems.
We only have five more years, according to IBM, to achieve thousands of qubits capable of running 1 billion gates, unlocking the full power of quantum computing. Along with Artificial Intelligence and Fusion energy, Quantum is one of the three most impactful areas of research now underway around the world, and IBM conntinues to be a leader in this vital space.