Learning Cloud Quantum Programming

This repo contains my study resources for learning cloud quantum programming.

Shown to the left is a conceptual rendering of a bit vs a qubit, which is a fundamental concept of work in quantum computing. The Repo is a companion to my LI_L course "Cloud Quantum Computing Essentials"

A qubit is a two-state (or two-level) quantum-mechanical system, one of the simplest quantum systems displaying the peculiarity of quantum mechanics. A quantum computer performs quantum computations using the principles of quantum mechanics.

A QPU (quantum processing units) manipulates the quantum states of available qubits in a controlled way to perform computations, such as algorithms. A qubit is a quantum bit of information.

A quantum computer contains QPU processors, some number of qubits and the support mechanisms which allow these items to interact based on quantum instructions or programs.

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What's Here

This Repo is organized by folder as follows:

• concepts - info about quantum languages, libraries, operations, reference programs (Shor's, Grover's, etc...) and notation
• cloud-vendors - info about quantum runtime environments (and simulators) organized by cloud vendor (AWS, Azure, GCP and IBM)
• whitepapers - academic research papers of interest including quantum programming algorithms and examples
• o-reilly-book - code examples, slides and link from a 15-week-long bookclub covering the referenced book on quantum programming

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Quantum Computer Example

There are a number of quantum computer vendors. These vendors produce hardware (quantum computers) which contains a particular number of qubits and QPUs.

One example is the D-Wave company. Shown to the right are photos from one of D-Wave's quantum computers. This computer contains QPU units, which is hardware with qubits (image taken from D-Wave whitepaper). To run quantum programs on quantum hardware, use quantum languages or libraries.

NOTE: Generally quantum programs are run on quantum simulators prior to being run on quantum hardware due to the cost and time run on live QPUs.

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Quantum Programs and IDEs

Shown below are screenshots from a couple of quantum programming development environments. This is just a small subset of the available options. Generally these IDEs are either cloud-based (IBM Composer) or downloadable via a SDK (D-Wave).

• The first example (shown below) shows running a quantum program in the IBM Quantum Composer IDE. This example runs the Grover-example quantum program. The visual environment includes the composer, which shows quantum operations written in the OPENQASM quantum programming language and a number of other visualization tools.

• The second example (shown below) is from from D-Wave Systems cloud at https://cloud.dwavesys.com/ and is being run using VSCode as an IDE. The sample shows a path optimization solver and is called path in the D-Wave examples. The program is written using the D-Wave Python-like quantum programming library. This IDE is a more traditional environment and doesn't include as many visualization tools for the state of the qubits used in computation.

Resources for Learning

• Yet another example of a quantum program visualization tools is the browser-based Quantum Playground - http://www.quantumplayground.net/. Shown below is an example of animated output using the H gate example code. This is a particularly good tool for gaining an intuition into key quantum operations and program examples.

• The QuanTime website (partnership with National Q-12 Education Partnership group) aggregates resources and links to materials which are designed to be used by educators - https://q12education.org/quantime

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