Quantum Software

Which companies are active in the software domain of quantum? What is their path to viability if quantum hardware is years away? Pennylane from Xanadu, Qiskit from IBM, Cirq from Google, tket from Quantinuum, Qulacs from Fujitsu, cuQuantum and Cuda-Q from Nvidia, and many others. Also open source options like Yao.jl, Qutip, Qibo, pyquil…. “Quantum” software is simply regular software to either simulate quantum systems via regular linear algebra or regular software for controlling the quantum hardware. The former is limited to small systems due to exponential use of memory and time (that’s the entire point of having a quantum computer to begin with). The latter is not supposed to be groundbreaking, it’s just classical software to control the electronics of the other computer. Just want to add that even the company-backed software you mentioned is open source. PennyLane, Qiskit, Cirq, and CUDA-Q are all open source (the others may be too but I'm less familar) so the dividing line isn't so much about openness as it is about corporate backing vs academia/community run. As a startup founder in quantum software, I've seen the quantum software stack from top to bottom. There are five key areas of quantum software from my perspective: Application level software: where the software helps to build and analyze applications for quantum computers. Circuit builders, workflow builders, tools for analyzing the program, etc. Mid-level software: Software to bring the programs to the cloud hardware and back. These are schedulers, resource allocators, monitors, etc. Hardware-aware software: Software to optimize quantum programs for the hardware. This is transpilers, error mitigation and prevention, etc. Control level: Software to control the hardware. Operating systems, low-level code. Quantum simulators: Software to simulate a quantum computer. These are your simulators like Qiskit, Pennylane Lightning, cuQuantum. All of these areas can be developed on under the assumption of the input and output of the quantum computer. The control level and hardware-aware parts need more care not to over assume, but others can be worked on more freely. There are various companies working at each level. I can list a few for each layer if you're interested. Yes please, great insight. Would love to know your thoughts on sealsq and wisekey aswell. Sure. Here are some examples, and I will try to add to the list later on. Of course, there are many many companies and I don't know all of them, but the first ones that come to my head are the ones I list. Application level: Here I want to make a bit of distinction, because there are companies that use available software to build applications, and there are companies that write software to allow others to build applications. For the former, companies like Phasecraft and Zapata come to mind. Most enterprise research would be consumers of application software as well. For the latter, companies like Aqarios, Horizon Quantum, Classiq, and IBM (for Qiskit) come to mind. For the mid-level: There are not many companies in this territory. This is where my company sits. We build software to automate using hybrid and distributed systems. Companies like qBraid, Strageworks, and Blue Qubit come to mind, but generally there are no distributed options. I'd place those almost at the application level. Hardware-aware software: These are companies like Q-CTRL and Haiqu. They focus on transpilers and error mitigation methods, closer to the hardware. Classiq also has software in this layer. Control level: Companies like Quantum Machines and Riverlane. These are very close to the hardware, and work at the FPGA level in most cases. Quantum simulators: These most often come from universities, but companies like Quantum Rings and QPerfect have closed-source simulators. This is a tricky game, because there are a lot of open source quantum simulators out there. My company also works on this layer, but we build something that tries to unify the simulation ecosystem under one umbrella. There are so many companies, so don't take this list as finite or of quality. What are some of the most popular applications and algorithms being used / developed you’d say? My understanding is there is Shors and Grover but I’ve seen debate around how there is a shortage of algorithms to take advantage of quantum properties - wondering if you think this is true? Certainly there is a shortage of useful algorithms, but generally people are using variational algorithms or sampling based approaches when they are using real hardware. Otherwise, it is very hard to get meaningful results that compare with classical algorithms. To prevent trolling, accounts with less than zero comment karma cannot post in r/QuantumComputing. 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There are hundreds of companies and organizations. The main point is that "years away" is sometimes as little as 3, or even less. The thing is not "is quantum computing available" but rather, "does an application have a good business case?" For instance, let's draw a parallel with regular computing. In the very beginning, it was slow, expensive, cumbersome, and globally the estimations of how many of those novel "computers" would be necessary was O(1)... Yet it gave some benefit in certain specific use cases. So let's take the specifics and performance of "computer X". It was crucial in the moon missions. So, yes a good business case there. Simultaneously, putting computer X in the role of a pregnancy test was not. Yet, that does actually exist now. The vast majority of people I know in the field, make the same categorical mistakes in reasoning, as the same concentration of experts did when the conventional computer arrived. So, those software companies do nothing other that "the work" behind a business case. See if it works, if it does, how expensive is it? How fast is it? Do I get some different result? What are these differences worth? What should they be at what cost? That being said, most companies just coast on the hype. They don't ask the critical, often business specific questions to check if there is an actual value add, nor are very transparent about cost. If they did, they'd create transparency to themselves and the client and they wouldn't be able to coast on the hype anymore. But that is what we need, what users need, what hardware vendors need. So, break the hype, do the coding, compile, execute, and review critically with business owners. And we'll have those fuckers doing cat videos within the decade. Key question: what can this system which costs £Xm do better than a classical computer that costs £0.01? This is not a question that classical computers faced - their question was what can this computer that costs £xm do better than a room filled with 200 people that all make more than minimum wage. It's still a similar question. It's also not just cost driven. It's a miss conception for quantum computing that it is just cheaper. I don't even know how that got started. Due to I/O overhead, there are no large data driven challenges that quantum computers would solve. Almost all cost driven compute challenges nowadays are data driven. So none of those make sense. What makes sense is stuff that changes approaches to business cases, or makes some none data heavy step worthwhile. And, not the least of all, there are organisational challenges that were previously unsolvable and simply have been forgotten... Quantum software is irrelavant without quantum algorithms, by which I mean algorithms that offer large polynomial speedups at least vs. classical. There are very very very few of these (two for sure, maybe add "reality itself" as well, maybe there are a few more like quantum mcmc and mip ) until this picture changes who cares about wraps around them? This isn't a programable future - it's a special machine future. Classiq is the only pure-play quantum software company. It is fully focues on enterprise and government business, however, it provides free academic licenses for academic, not for profit, usage path to viability, as far as I understand it, is that market for quantum software is large today and growing Create your account and connect with a world of communities.