Because evolution is unitary.
Unitary Fund Community Calendar
Want to keep up to date with all the cool stuff the Unitary Fund community is up to? Take a look at the calendar below and add it to your favorite calendar app!
Interested in hosting a community call for your project on our Discord? Fill out the application form, and we'll get back to you with more details!
Quantum Software Talks
The Unitary Fund is pleased to host a online talk series that features open source quantum software projects. All seminars will be hosted at twitch.tv/unitaryfund, and if you want to chat with the speakers or the community more generally, check out the Unitary Fund Discord.If you work on a open source quantum software and have a project you would like to speak about, please drop us a line!
Upcoming talks
Previous talks
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7 April, 2022 - 12pm EST/5pm GMT
qutip-qip: Pulse-level circuits simulation by Boxi Li
About the talk
In quantum computing, a quantum circuit is often represented as a sequence of unitary gates. However, when engineering quantum hardware, the physical qubits and their dynamics are usually described by the Hamiltonians. The characterization of noise also varies in those two different representations. Boxi will talk about quantum circuits represented by the control Hamiltonians and introduce the qutip-qip package, which represents and simulates quantum circuits at the pulse level. As a family package under the QuTiP organization, it leverages QuTiP's quantum dynamics solvers to solve the continuous time evolution of the qubits with realistic physical models. The package includes a few predefined physical models and provides the necessary compiling and scheduling functionality. In addition, it allows the user to build custom models of physical qubits and define various types of noise, such as environment-induced decoherence and noise in the control pulses.
About the speaker
Boxi Li is a PhD candidate at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Jülich research centre) in Germany, working on quantum control and modelling for superconducting qubits. I did my Bachelors at the University of Heidelberg and went to ETHZ for a master's degree, during which I also enjoyed a short stay at TU Delft, exploring the magic of quantum networks. I started my contribution to QuTiP from a GSoC project in 2019 and joined the development team thereafter, mainly maintaining the qutip-qip repository.
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23 November, 2021 - 12pm EST/5pm GMT
qrand: A multi-platform and multi-protocol quantum random number generator for arbitrary probability distributions by Pedro Rivero
About the talk
Random numbers are everywhere. Computer algorithms, data encryption, physical simulations, and even the arts use them all the time. There is one problem though: it turns out that they are actually very difficult to produce in large amounts. Luckily, the probabilistic nature of quantum computers makes these devices particularly useful for the task. QRAND introduces a versatile interface layer between NumPy and several quantum computing platforms (qiskit, cirq, qsharp...), along with some useful functionality that enables the production of quantum random numbers (QRN) according to different quantum protocols, and for a wide variety of probability distributions.
About the speaker
Pedro Rivero is an algorithm and quantum software developer at Argonne National Laboratory and is enrolled in a a PhD course at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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11 November, 2021 - 11:30 PST/19:30 GMT
pyGSTi: A toolkit for quantum characterization by Erik Nielsen and Kenneth Rudinger
Sample Jupyter notebooks from the talk
About the talk
In this talk, we will present pyGSTi, a python package for generating and analyzing quantum characterization, verification, and validation experiments, with particular focus on gate set tomography and scalable forms of randomized benchmarking. pyGSTi has been used to characterize and improve quantum hardware performance across a wide variety of platforms, including trapped ion, superconducting transmon, and silicon spin qubit devices. We will discuss the motivation behind pyGSTi, explore the functionality of and interplay between its basic objects, and provide several demonstrations of the code in action. These demonstrations will span a variety of examples, from high-level analyses which require minimal pyGSTi knowledge to more complex use cases which can fully leverage pyGSTi’s broad capabilities.
About the speaker
Erik and Kenneth both are researchers and developers working on pyGSTi at Sandia National Labs.
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19 August, 2021 - 12pm EST/5pm GMT
Intro to VeriFrodo: The post-quantum cryptographic software ecosystem by Goutam Tamvada
About the talk
Verifrodo is an open-source package implementing a lattice-based quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms in Jasmin within the Open Quantum Safe project. This talk will provide an overview of post-quantum cryptography and its use in internet protocols and software applications, as well as place our Unitary Fund project, VeriFrodo, in this context.
About the speaker
Goutam Tamvada has a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and has been working on open source software for the Open Quantum Safe project for the past 2 years.
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20 May, 2021 - 12pm EST/5pm GMT
Intro to Pulser: Pulse simulation and design for neutral atoms by Loïc Henriet
About the talk
The manipulation of neutral atoms by light is at the heart of countless scientific discoveries in the field of quantum physics in the last three decades. The level of control that has been achieved at the single particle level within arrays of optical traps, while preserving the fundamental properties of quantum matter (coherence, entanglement, superposition), makes these technologies prime candidates to implement disruptive computation paradigms. In this talk, I will present pulser, a recently developed open-source python framework enabling practitioners to control those devices at the pulse level.
About the speaker
Loïc Henriet holds an engineering degree and a PhD in theoretical physics from Ecole Polytechnique, in France. He subsequently worked as a researcher at the Institute for Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain. His research interests lied in the description of collective effects in light-matter systems. In June 2019, he joined Pasqal, a Paris-based quantum computing startup manufacturing quantum processors powered by arrays of single atoms. Since then, he has been heading the quantum software developments.
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18 March, 2021 - 12pm EST/5pm GMT
Intro to QuNetSim: A Software Framework for Quantum Networks by Stephen DiAdamo
About the talk
QuNetSim is a quantum-enabled network simulator that adds common quantum networking tasks like teleportation, superdense coding, sharing EPR pairs, etc, to aid in the develop of quantum networking protocols. With QuNetSim, one can design and test robust quantum network protocols under various network conditions. In this presentation I will give an overview of what QuNetSim does and demonstrate some examples of how it can be used.
About the speaker
Stephen DiAdamo is an electrical engineering PhD student from TU Munich. After completing his bachelor's in computer science from the University of Toronto, he moved to Munich, Germany to complete a mathematics master's degree at TU Munich and continued after as a PhD student. His research involves applications of entanglement in quantum networks as well as quantum simulation development.
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28 January, 2021 - 12pm EST/5pm GMT
Intro to QuTiP: A Quantum Toolbox in Python by Shahnawaz Ahmed
About the talk
QuTiP: A quantum toolbox in Python, is one of the most popular tools to simulate open quantum systems – but it has expanded beyond that over the years. It is a simple but powerful library that, used by students, researchers, engineers, is having a tremendous impact on quantum science research. QuTiP is also Unitary Fund’s first affiliated project. In this talk, I will introduce the library and take the example of some new developments in QuTiP to show the ease with which one can simulate open quantum systems as well as contribute to the development of such open-source software tools to promote reproducibility and therefore accelerate the adoption of a particular simulation technique across the research community.
About the speaker
Shahnawaz Ahmed is a graduate student at the Wallenberg Center for Quantum Technology at Chalmers University, Sweden. His research interest lies in the intersection of machine learning and quantum computing. He also works on numerical approaches to solve problems in open quantum systems and is a member of the QuTiP development team.
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03 December, 2020 - 12pm EST/5pm GMT
Intro to qcor: Extending C++ for Heterogeneous Quantum-Classical Computing by Alex McCaskey
About the talk
We present qcor - a language extension to C++ and compiler implementation that enables heterogeneous quantum-classical programming, compilation, and execution in a single-source context. Our work provides a first-of-its-kind C++ compiler enabling high-level quantum kernel (function) expression in a quantum-language agnostic manner, as well as a hardware-agnostic, retargetable compiler workflow targeting a number of physical and virtual quantum computing backends. qcor leverages novel Clang plugin interfaces and builds upon the XACC system-level quantum programming framework to provide a state-of-the-art integration mechanism for quantum-classical compilation that leverages the best from the community at-large. qcor translates quantum kernels ultimately to the XACC intermediate representation, and provides user-extensible hooks for quantum compilation routines like circuit optimization, analysis, and placement. This work details the overall architecture and compiler workflow for qcor, and provides a number of illuminating programming examples demonstrating its utility for near-term variational tasks, quantum algorithm expression, and feed-forward error correction schemes.
About the speaker
Alex McCaskey is a research scientist in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He serves as the Software Lead for the Quantum Computing Institute at ORNL and is the Project Lead for the XACC quantum framework and the QCOR quantum-classical C++ compiler. He received his Masters in Physics from Virginia Tech and BS degrees in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Tennessee.
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12 November, 2020 - 12pm EST/5pm GMT
Intro to qrack: a framework for fast quantum simulation by Daniel Strano
About the talk
vm6502q/qrack is a quantum computer simulation framework designed for the highest performance on the widest possible range of consumer-grade "classical" hardware platforms. It has 0 required external software dependencies besides C++11 standard, it optionally supports OpenCL accelerators back to the v1.1 standard, including multi-accelerator operation, and it prides itself on its "novel optimization layer." The speaker will outline the many features of the framework, including the theory behind the novel optimization layer, culminating in a simulator stack whose general use case is also its highest performance "Swiss Army knife" simulator, which has been integrated with a much wider developing quantum open source stack via plugins. Quantitative benchmarks will also be discussed, including performance on the quantum Fourier transform and an example of a "quantum volume"-type random universal circuit. Check out the project Discord for more info!
About the speaker
Daniel Strano is senior software developer for PDHI (Basking Ridge, NJ). He holds a B.A. in physics and has worked as a data scientist or software engineer for companies including Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (Richland, WA) and S&A Technologies, LLC (Newark, NJ). For the past three years, he is the lead developer of the vm6502q/qrack quantum computing simulation framework, along with Benn Bollay, which has received a Unitary Fund grant. His personal research and literary blog is at ultraphrenia.com, including information and videos about his open source extensions to the OpenRelativity physics module for Unity3D, by the MIT Game Lab, to which he is a community contributor via a personal fork on GitHub.