Quantum Inspire SDK

The Quantum Inspire platform allows to execute quantum algorithms using the cQASM language.

The software development kit (SDK) for the Quantum Inspire platform consists of:

• An API for the Quantum Inspire platform (the QuantumInspireAPI class);
• Backends for:
  • the ProjectQ SDK;
  • the Qiskit SDK.

For more information on Quantum Inspire see https://www.quantum-inspire.com/. Detailed information on cQASM can be found in the Quantum Inspire knowledge base.

Examples of more complex algorithms that make use of Quantum Inspire SDK can be found in Quantum Inspire Examples.

Installation

The Quantum Inspire SDK can be installed from PyPI via pip:

pip install quantuminspire

In addition, to use Quantum Inspire through Qiskit or ProjectQ, install either or both of the qiskit and projectq packages:

pip install qiskit
pip install projectq

Installing from source

The source for the SDK can also be found at Github. For the default installation execute:

git clone https://github.com/QuTech-Delft/quantuminspire
cd quantuminspire
pip install .

This does not install ProjectQ or Qiskit, but will install the Quantum Inspire backends for those projects.

If you want to include a specific SDK as a dependency, install with (e.g. for the ProjectQ backend):

pip install .[projectq]

To install both ProjectQ as well as Qiskit as a dependency:

pip install .[qiskit,projectq]

Installing for generating documentation

To install the necessary packages to perform documentation activities for SDK do:

pip install -e .[rtd]

The documentation generation process is dependent on pandoc. When you want to generate the documentation and pandoc is not yet installed on your system navigate to Pandoc and follow the instructions found there to install pandoc. To build the 'readthedocs' documentation do:

cd docs
make html

The documentation is then build in 'docs/_build/html' and can be viewed here.

Running

For example usage see the python scripts and Jupyter notebooks in the docs/examples directory when installed from source or the share/doc/quantuminspire/examples/ directory in the library root (Python’s sys.prefix for system installations; site.USER_BASE for user installations) when installed from PyPI.

For example, to run the ProjectQ example notebook after installing from source:

cd docs/examples
jupyter notebook example_projectq.ipynb

Or to perform Grover's with the ProjectQ backend from a Python script:

cd docs/examples
python example_projectq_grover.py

Another way to browse and run the available notebooks is by clicking the 'launch binder' button above.

It is also possible to use the API through the QuantumInspireAPI object directly. This is for advanced users that really know what they are doing. The intention of the QuantumInspireAPI class is that it is used as a thin layer between existing SDK's such as ProjectQ and Qiskit, and is not primarily meant for general use. You may want to explore this if you intend to write a new backend for an existing SDK.

A simple example to perform entanglement between two qubits by using the API wrapper directly:

from getpass import getpass
from coreapi.auth import BasicAuthentication
from quantuminspire.api import QuantumInspireAPI

print('Enter mail address')
email = input()

print('Enter password')
password = getpass()

server_url = r'https://api.quantum-inspire.com'
authentication = BasicAuthentication(email, password)
qi = QuantumInspireAPI(server_url, authentication, 'my-project-name')

qasm = '''version 1.0

qubits 2

H q[0]
CNOT q[0], q[1]
Measure q[0,1]
'''

backend_type = qi.get_backend_type_by_name('QX single-node simulator')
result = qi.execute_qasm(qasm, backend_type=backend_type, number_of_shots=1024)

if result.get('histogram', {}):
    print(result['histogram'])
else:
    reason = result.get('raw_text', 'No reason in result structure.')
    print(f'Result structure does not contain proper histogram data. {reason}')

Configure a project name for Quantum Inspire

As a default, SDK stores the jobs in a Quantum Inspire project with the name "qi-sdk-project-" concatenated with a unique identifier for each run. Providing a project name yourself makes it easier to find the project in the Quantum Inspire web-interface and makes it possible to gather related jobs to the same project.

Qiskit users do something like:

from coreapi.auth import BasicAuthentication
from quantuminspire.qiskit import QI

authentication = BasicAuthentication("email", "password")
QI.set_authentication(authentication, project_name='my-project-name')

or set the project name separately after setting authentication

from coreapi.auth import BasicAuthentication
from quantuminspire.qiskit import QI

authentication = BasicAuthentication("email", "password")
QI.set_authentication(authentication)
QI.set_project_name('my-project-name')

ProjectQ users set the project name while initializing QuantumInspireAPI:

from coreapi.auth import BasicAuthentication
from quantuminspire.api import QuantumInspireAPI

authentication = BasicAuthentication("email", "password")
qi_api = QuantumInspireAPI(authentication=authentication, project_name='my-project-name')

Configure your token credentials for Quantum Inspire

1. Create a Quantum Inspire account if you do not already have one.
2. Get an API token from the Quantum Inspire website.
3. With your API token run:

from quantuminspire.credentials import save_account
save_account('YOUR_API_TOKEN')

After calling save_account(), your credentials will be stored on disk. Those who do not want to save their credentials to disk should use instead:

from quantuminspire.credentials import enable_account
enable_account('YOUR_API_TOKEN')

and the token will only be active for the session.

After calling save_account() once or enable_account() within your session, token authentication is done automatically when creating the Quantum Inspire API object.

For Qiskit users this means:

from quantuminspire.qiskit import QI
QI.set_authentication()

ProjectQ users do something like:

from quantuminspire.api import QuantumInspireAPI
qi = QuantumInspireAPI()

To create a token authentication object yourself using the stored token you do:

from quantuminspire.credentials import get_authentication
authentication = get_authentication()

This authentication can then be used to initialize the Quantum Inspire API object.

Testing

Run all unit tests and collect the code coverage using:

coverage run --source="./src/quantuminspire" -m unittest discover -s src/tests -t src -v
coverage report -m

Known issues

• Known issues and common questions regarding the Quantum Inspire platform can be found in the FAQ.

Bug reports

Please submit bug-reports on the github issue tracker.