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28.7.2023
Will Zeng

Unitary Fund Q2 2023 Update: unitaryHACK stats, UF France, 7 new grants and projects updates

Dear Unitary Fund community,

We are excited to share our 2023 Q2 quarterly update!

unitaryHACK 2023 arrived and wrapped up, thanks all for joining, this was Unitary Fund’s largest event to date: over 750 participants from 80+ countries, solving 99 bounties with awards of $11k across 33 participating projects. Thanks to all participants, maintainers and sponsors (AWS, Classiq and UF members) for making this happen!

The community feedback for unitaryHACK has been amazing, with 44% of hackers said they will continue with the projects they hacked on during this event, and an additional 41% of hackers saying they would like to continue making contributions if they have time. An estimated 60% of hackers were making their first contributions to QOSS for this event. Please read more about winners, stats and project information about the event in this blog post here co-authored by unitaryHACK director Nate Stemen.

We’re also excited to announce the inauguration of Unitary Fund France, Unitary Fund’s first European office. We’ve also welcomed Min, Srila and Ali as Summer Interns.

We awarded 7 new grants this quarter to fund new projects and enrich existing projects of useful tooling for the quantum open source ecosystem, ranging from TorchQuantum for quantum machine learning, to stac, for quantum error correction, and also some follow up grants to QWorld and HieraQcal.

Last quarter was a very busy time for scientific research with open-source tools by the Unitary Fund technical staff and our collaborators, with three more papers uploaded on arXiv: Misty Wahl (UF tech staff) and co-authors at UF and the University of Chicago upgraded quantum error mitigation with zero-noise extrapolation to quantum error correction regime and fault tolerance in this paper.

Dan Strano (UF tech staff) and core contributors of the Qrack project, with collaborators from UF, tuned up the capabilities of what is possible to simulate with a single GPU in terms of NISQ devices, in this paper. Both papers got accepted as proceedings in IEEE Quantum Week! In this paper, researchers at Los Alamos National Lab and Unitary Fund tech staff showed how quantum error mitigation can be used to increase with Mitiq the effective quantum volume of four IBM Quantum devices. Finally, we’ve written a perspective on how to make quantum error mitigation practical sooner in this blog post.

Mitiq got a new calibration feature added, which you can read more in this blog post. You can use some pre-built routines to pick the best quantum error mitigation technique and parameters for your problem.

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:

      v0.25.0, v.0.26, v.0.27

      • New features:

        • In v.0.25.0: Bug fixing for digital dynamical

          decoupling (DDD), extended documentation for identity insertion as a noise scaling technique, new results from testing DDD on IBMQ hardware, a new function to generate W-state circuits for benchmarks, and a finalized calibration API.

        • In v.0.26.0: Highlights from this release include

          functions for applying Pauli Twirling of CNOT and CZ gates, support for noise scaling by circuit layer in ZNE, functions to generate Quantum Phase Estimation benchmarking circuits, and a new example composing two Mitiq techniques: REM and ZNE. Special thanks to UF Ambassadors Purva Thakre and Aaron Robertson for their contributions to this release!

        • In v.0.27.0: Highlights from this release include

          adding new benchmark quantum circuits: Mirror Quantum Volume Circuits (@purva-thakre) and adding PEC as technique supported by calibration (@Misty-W). After approval of the related RFC on quantum subspace expansion technique, the first utils have been added (@bubakazouba). Other improvements include a new tutorial on quantum many body scars (@DHuybrechts); issues solved during unitaryHACK such as improvement to the cost estimation for Calibrator (@YuNariai), Qiskit Upgrade and Deprecation Warnings (@andre-a-alves), and a new function to register user defined Mitiq converters (@Aaron-Robertson).

    • Podcast:

      • Infinite Loops — Will Zeng — “Towards a Quantum Future”

    • Talks:

  • [Metriq]{.ul}

    • Hackathon contributors to Metriq added LaTeX parsing and

      completely revamped the Python Metriq client examples! We continued to build a pipeline for running independent hardware benchmarks and automatically inserting them into Metriq, which incidentally led Metriq developers to fix a critical bug in the open-source Qiskit Quantinuum provider module. Many new and historical results were added to the Metriq database, including results from our benchmark pipeline.

  • UF Research

    • 2304.14969 Exact and approximate simulation of large

      quantum circuits on a single GPU

    • 2304.14985 Zero noise extrapolation on logical qubits by

      scaling the error correction code distance

    • 2306.15863 Increasing the Measured Effective Quantum

      Volume with Zero Noise Extrapolation

  • New Grants

News from UF Projects

  • Bra-Ket-Vue

    • A few years ago, we gave a UF microgrant for

      Bra-Ket-Vue, which later became a part of the Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap. The lab was recently nominated, among four other projects, including OpenAI and NASA websites, to the Webby Awards (Best Science Websites category). The Webby Awards, hailed as the ‘OSCARS® of the Internet’ by the New York Times, are one of the most prestigious honors in the digital industry*.* The Webby nomination page.]{.ul} Articles: 1, 2, Crafted With Code

  • ALF

    • ALF has a new version, 2.5, which offers better handling of

      errors; improved, automatic compilation of HDF5; safer restart function. More details here.

  • QWorld

    • QWorld Quantum Science Days 2023

      (QSD2023) was held virtually on May 29-31 bringing researchers across the quantum domain and the world together to network and present their work. We hosted 9 invited speakers who shared their perspectives on quantum simulation, quantum and society, circuit design and beyond. Aligning with QWorld’s mission to educate globally and build an open quantum ecosystem, we premiered the thematic session “Building an Open Quantum Ecosystem” with speakers from diverse global and national initiatives to democratize quantum education and resources. Moreover, we selected a diverse and stimulating program of 31 contributed talks over three days. QSD2023 was sponsored by Unitary Fund and Classiq, and supported by the Latvian Quantum Initiative. QGermany joined the QCousins network as the 26th one.

  • Qrack

    • The Qrack developers and Unitary Fund wrote the first report

      on the design of Qrack and its comparative benchmarks, publishing the report on arXiv and ultimately being accepted into IEEE Quantum Week proceedings for 2023. In the meantime, Qrack has begun to experiment with and release “hybrid stabilizer” techniques that can exactly and approximately simulate near-Clifford circuits. These near-Clifford techniques can even be used for circuit compilation, as opposed to only for simulation.

Coming up this Quarter

  • More Quantum Wednesdays!

    • Jul 26th, Srila Palanikumar, “A review of Google Quantum’s

      quantum supremacy results”

    • Aug 2nd, Ali Gedawi, “IBM recent quantum error mitigation

      results and related classical simulations”

    • Full list of past talks with slides can be found in [this

      repo](https://github.com/unitaryfund/quantum-wednesday).

  • A new community call is hosted on the UF Discord, by the QICK

    (Quantum Instrumentation Kit) project on Fridays at 1pm PT. You’re welcome to join it!

  • UF tech staff will be at IEEE Quantum Week in Bellevue,

    Washington, Sept 17-22! We’ll give a Mitiq tutorial, research talks and participate in an open science workshop.