Dear Unitary Fund community,

We are excited to share our quarterly update and highlight UF’s activities for last year in the recently released 2022 Annual Report: Check it out for lots of interesting content on microgrants, testimonials, stats and details on software and research from the past year.

Reminder: unitaryHACK 2023 is coming May 26-June 13th! Sign up here!

Last quarter we announced the 2023 cohort of Unitary Fund members: as core members, IBM Quantum and Scientifica Venture Capital, and as supporting members, Agnostiq, AWS, Cisco, Dorahacks, Pasqal, Quandela, and Qyber. Thanks to their leadership, and the generosity of our other supporters, UF can continue its mission of cultivating the quantum open source ecosystem.

We continue to update Metriq and have implemented an automatic API to run quantum computing benchmarks, as defined by the QED-C consortium. You can read more about it in this blog post.

Mitiq got some nice updates in its documentation and with a new quantum-error-mitigation calibration module that makes it easier to choose the right parameter to apply.

We awarded grants to enrich existing projects of useful tooling, such as OpenQAOA and the Qiskit transpiler, and funded Graphix, the first UF grant supporting the simulation of measurement-based quantum computing.

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

  • New Releases: v0.23.0, v0.24.0

    • New features for the calibration of quantum error mitigation module and a new tutorial

    • The Examples section is tidied up and now has examples for digital dynamical decoupling (DDD) with Cirq and with Qiskit on hardware.

    • Special thanks to the volunteering contributors for their help on the readout error mitigation module and identity insertion scaling for ZNE: @purva-thakre @nickgardner @amirebrahimi!

  • Talks and Posters:

    • March 9th, 2023 - Qiskit Demo Days, "Updates from Mitiq". @nathanshammah

    • March 30-31st, 2023 - ARQC All-Hands Meeting, Berkeley Lab, Berkeley, Talk on Mitiq by @nathanshammah, posters by @mistywahl @natestemen @vprusso

• Metriq

  • Automatically running QED-C benchmarks on Metriq (blog post)

• UF Research

  • “Automated quantum error mitigation based on probabilistic error reduction”, was published in the proceedings of IEEE International Workshop on Quantum Computing Software (link)

• New Grants

  • To Matt Lourens, to further develop HierarQcal, a tool to simplify the generation of custom quantum circuits for neural architecture search.

  • To Pengyuan (Bill) Zhai and Susanne Yelin, develop NFNet, a non-interacting fermion simulation network for large-scale quantum systems. [arXiv]

  • To Alejandro Montanez-Barrera to simplify benchmarking of optimization problems in OpenQAOA. [arXiv]

  • To Shinichi Sunami and Masato Fukushima to develop Graphix, an open-source library to optimize and simulate measurement-based quantum computing.

  • To Harshit Gupta to further develop a timeline debugger for the Qiskit transpiler.

News from UF Projects

• HierarQcal, A quick and easy way to build or generate Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks, was featured on the UF blog in guest post (link)

• Lattice Surgery Compiler

  • New paper and code for the Lattice Surgery Compiler: “A High Performance Compiler for Very Large Scale Surface Code Computations” https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02459

• PyMatching

  • Paper on sparse blossom (pymatching v2) https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15933. The paper is on version 2 (released last quarter) of PyMatching, which is 100x-1000x faster than earlier versions. The headline figure is that it can decode both X and Z bases of surface code circuits in under 1 microsecond per round on a single core up to distance 17 at 0.1% circuit noise, which matches the throughput of superconducting quantum computers. Pymatching version 2.1.0 was released in January 2023 with some more minor feature additions.

• Qrack

  • We started distributing standalone library and utility installers for major operating systems, no source build required.
  • Thanks to @andreamari for help on approximate simulations: Qrack can now internally estimate its own random circuit sampling fidelity without any significant overhead.
  • Qrack now supports CUDA as an alternative to OpenCL for GPU acceleration, with very comparable performance, but expanding hardware support to NVLink and SLI and also adding a GPU-acceleration option to Windows Subsystem for Linux.

• Quarc

  • QUARC: A Hybrid System for Bounded Model Checking, was featured in a guest post on the UF blog (link)

• QWorld

  • The second edition of fully-virtual graduate-level QCourse511-2 “Quantum Computing & Programming” was successfully completed in January 2023. 103 students from 36 countries passed the course. As a part of it, with the support of Unitary Fund, QWorld offered five self-study modules covering 30% of the course: Quantum Error Correction, Quantum Annealing, Topological Quantum Computing, Quantum Key Distribution, & Oracular Quantum Algorithms. Each student is asked to complete one self-study module. 83 students completed at least one self-study module successfully.

  • QGhana joined the QWorld family as the 25th QCousin: https://qworld.net/qghana/

Coming up this Quarter

• Scientifica, a UF member, launched a Call 4 Ideas for startups in quantum!

• unitaryHACK 2023 is coming May 26-June 13th! Sign up here!