QPUs or quantum processor units which act on qubits are the units of computation for quantum programs. There are a number of core concepts associated with QPUs and qubits.
- A Bloch sphere, shown to the right is usually used to visualize the state(s) of the associated qubits when running a quantum program.
- The north and south poles of the Bloch sphere are typically chosen to correspond to the standard basis vectors ∣0⟩ and ∣1⟩ on the Z-axis.
- IMPORTANT: Post - explaining 'Qubit Basis States' (Z-basis and more) - link
- There are a growing nubmer of quantum computing languages and libraries.
- Many of these languages are designed to run on a particular vendor's environment.
- This includes offerings from public cloud vendors - see this link
| Name | Type | Vendor | Runtime Envs | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QCEngine | library | O'Reilly book | browser --> link | multiple languages |
| Qiskit | library | IBM | IBM Quantum Lab / Jupyter notebook | IBM SDK |
| OpenQASM | language | IBM | IBM Quantum Composer --> link | IBM SDK |
| Braket | SDK | AWS | Sagemaker Notebook | Example notebook uses conda_braket library |
| Q# | language | Microsoft | Jupyter notebook or VSCode --> link | can call from Python (notebook) |
| Cirq | library | Colab or GCP / QCS | Python env, includes quantum function libraries: qsim, qsimh... | |
| PennyLane | library | AWS Braket SDK and others | uses examples on hardware from D-Wave, IonQ or Rigetti | often used with ML (see below) |
- 📺 Video: "Lunch & Learn: Quantum Computing" 40 min talk -link
- 📺 Video: "The Map of Quantum Computing" 30 min talk - link
- 📺 Video: "Companies and Types of Quantum Computers" 12 min talk - link
- 📺 Video: "Quantum Steampunk" 55 min talk by theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern - link
- 🗣️ Podcast: "Screaming in the cloud: Quantum Leaps in Bioinformatics" me chatting with @QuinnyPig - link
- 📓 Article: "Quantum computing has a hype problem" - link
- 📺 Video: "Quantum AI - link