PennyLane-QuantumInspire Plugin

Release:

0.4.1

The PennyLane-QuantumInspire plugin integrates the Quantum Inspire quantum computing backends with PennyLane’s quantum machine learning capabilities.

PennyLane is a cross-platform Python library for quantum machine learning, automatic differentiation, and optimization of hybrid quantum-classical computations.

Quantum Inspire is a platform for quantum computing developed by QuTech.

This plugin relies heavily on the software development kit (SDK) for the Quantum Inspire platform and the PennyLane-Qiskit Plugin for Qiskit.

Qiskit is an open-source framework for quantum computing.

The Quantum Inspire device is build on top of the Qiskit device. The Quantum Inspire SDK registers a Quantum Inspire backend to Qiskit to run the algorithms on. This way we combine the strengths and ease of use of the Qiskit plugin with the computing power of Quantum Inspire backends.

Once the PennyLane-QuantumInspire plugin is installed and you have set up an API key for the Quantum Inspire platform, the Quantum Inspire device can be accessed straightaway in PennyLane, without the need to import new packages.

Backends

Currently, for the Quantum Inspire device four different backends are available:


Selecting backends in Quantum Inspire device

The Quantum Inspire backends specified in the previous section can be used by the Quantum Inspire device. Selecting a specific backend for the Quantum Inspire device can be done by passing a backend argument with the backend name:

dev = qml.device('quantuminspire.qi', wires=4, backend='QX single-node simulator')

PennyLane chooses the QX single-node simulator as the default backend if no backend is specified. For more details on the QX single-node simulator and the other emulator backends, including backend capacities, see Quantum Inspire Emulator backends documentation. For more details on the Quantum Inspire hardware backends, including operations specifics for the hardware backends, see Quantum Inspire Hardware backends documentation.

Tutorials

You can try it out using any of the qubit based demos from the PennyLane documentation, for example the tutorial on qubit rotation. Simply replace 'default.qubit' with the Quantum Inspire device 'quantuminspire.qi' and a backend of your choice, such as 'QX single-node simulator', or 'QX-34-L'.