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9.11.2022
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q3 2022 Update: QOSS Survey, interns, Summer school and 7 new projects!

We are excited to share our quarterly update and highlight some of what UF’s been involved with so far this year. We continue to grow the Mitiq project and Metriq.info platform with a wider community. We hosted two fantastic interns over the Summer, Maria and Karen, teaming up with Qubit by Qubit. We awarded 11 grants to amazing projects this quarter, spanning from the first Rust project supported by UF to an outreach program for highschool students. Finally, we’ve released the Quantum Open Source Software Survey and collected over 1000 responses: Thank you all for your continued support of the open-source quantum ecosystem!

Make sure to follow our Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, and our Community Calendar.

New from UF

  • Mitiq

    • The Mitiq whitepaper was published in Quantum 6, 774 (2022)

    • New Releases: v0.17.1, v0.18.0, v0.19.0

      • Version0.17.1 includes support for the latest versions of Qiskit (0.37.1), Cirq (1.0.0), and Pyquil (3.2.1).

      • Version 0.18.0 focused on review and approval of two RFCs, one for Readout Error Mitigation (REM) and one for Identity Insertion Noise Scaling.

      • Version 0.19.0 expanded support to the most recent versions of Python: 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10, and is now compatible with Numpy 1.21.6. We have also added new tools for applying learning-based PEC, and introduced a function for learning depolarizing noise representations from Clifford circuit data.

      • Read more about learning-based PEC in our updated API-doc.

      • Special thanks to the external contributors @yitchen-tim, @amirebrahimi and @isaac-gs!

    • Talks:

  • Metriq

    • You can submit results on existing benchmarks or propose new benchmarking tasks to the community. Visit Metriq.info and the #metriq channel on the Unitary Fund Discord to learn more!

    • New Releases: v.0.6.0, v.0.6.1

      • Version 0.6.0 focuses on UX upgrades, providing the option to subscribe to specific benchmark updates. Single-page application (SPA) best practices implemented, including improved navigation. Auto-complete fields when pasting arXiv URL in new submission (thanks to @cometta from unitaryHACK!), mobile view and chart style improvements, cookie policy notification when first visiting the website, +30% growth of database, updated Python client models and route end points (thanks to @MariaM0003 and @KarenRezkalla2, QxQ interns). Version 0.6.1 introduced tag subscriptions and daily new submission updates by opt-in.

  • QOSS Survey

    • With over 1,000 responses we have wrapped the first annual Quantum Open Source Survey. We want to thank everyone in the community who responded. This data will be an invaluable resource for all sectors of the quantum technology field, used to help guide funding, research, and new collaborations. The results have been posted on the Unitary Fund website.

  • New Grants

    • To Stefanie Muroya Lei and Christoph Kirsch, to develop QUARC within the Unicorn framework, a bounded model checking that verifies classical programs using the best classical and quantum algorithms.

    • To Omid Khosravani to develop adaptive quantum process tomography techniques through the use of reinforcement learning.

    • To Kaitlin Gili to conduct an outreach project called Iteration One, sparking curiosity among U.S. high school students with the most limited access to physics and computer science knowledge.

    • To Abdullah Khalid to write a methods focused guide to quantum error correction.

    • To Hong-Ye Hu, Yi-Zhuang You, and Susanne Yelin, to open-source PyClifford, a fast and flexible Python-based Clifford + few T gates simulator.

    • To Tim Weaving and Alexis Ralli, to develop Symmer into a fully scalable qubit reduction toolkit for the quantum computing community.

    • To Paria Naghavi to add code, visualizations, and conceptual content to the QIR Book, to build knowledge bridges for incoming users to the ecosystem.

  • Grant Winner Video Series

    • Hosted by Unitary Fund’s Misty Wahl, our new video series highlights recently funded projects in the microgrant program. Check out work from QRAND, PIQUE, and 2QAN.

  • Unitary Fund Intern Blog

    • Unitary Fund’s summer interns Maria Maryam and Karen Rezkalla have written posts about their experience and work on Metriq’s benchmarking tools.

  • SQMS/GGI Summer School: The UF Mitiq team (@andreamari @mistywahl @natestemen @nathanshammah @ryanlarose) participated in person at the Galileo Galilei Institute Summer School in Florence by SQMS. We gave a lecture on Quantum Error Mitigation (Slides, Video) + a hands-on lab on Mitiq (Jupyter notebooks. Video)

News from UF Projects

  • Qrack and PyQrack

    • We are thrilled that the quantum computer simulator libraries Qrack & PyQrack have officially joined the Unitary Fund GitHub organization of open source quantum computing repositories! Qrack is a quantum computer gate model simulator written in C++11, released under LGPL-3.0.d. PyQrack is Qrack’s dependency-free Python ctypes wrapper, to expose Qrack shared library binaries directly for just-in-time (JIT) execution via a Python interpreter: It gained over 300,000 downloads in a few months!

    • In addition, Qrack’s API v8 has been released! The focus of this update is the enforcement of bounds and input domain checking, to prevent bad user inputs from inducing segmentation faults. This quarter also saw Qrack achieve HPC distribution scaling to at least 8 GPUs in a node.

  • The ALF project has a new YouTube channel, along with a new reference paper.

  • QuTiP

    • Alex and Simon from the QuTiP admin team gave a short course on QuTiP at the Quantum Africa Summer School in Kigali, Rwanda. You can find the Jupyter book here.

    • Google Summer of Code student projects were completed, they are:

  • QWorld completed a 2-month long internship program, QIntern2022, with 20 projects, hosting 197 interns. New countries have joined the QCousins network. The 2nd Edition of the online introductory course on quantum computing and programming launched this quarter with more than 400 participating students. The course is conducted via a collaboration with the Faculty of Computing, University of Latvia.

Guest Blog Posts from the Community

Coming up next:

  • Metriq Weekly Jam Sessions on Discord are on Fridays at 9am ET

  • 2022 Unitary Fund Ambassadors announcements

  • New quantum OSS projects hosted on the UF Discord for community calls

  • Videos from QuTiP’s Google Summer of Code student projects

  • New research performed in Q4

  • New key features in Mitiq and documentation updates