Interactive quantum programming with Forest & Jupyter

The forest-notebook repository contains the Dockerfile for building the rigetti/forest-notebook image. This image contains an interactive quantum programming environment backed by JupyterLab, akin to the applications available in the Docker Stacks repository.

The image is based off of the rigetti/forest image, which comes with pyQuil installed, as well as quilc and QVM servers running in the background. The rigetti/forest-notebook image additionally has the forest-benchmarking library installed, along with some useful Python packages for data analysis and visualization. Finally, it contains jupyter and the new JupyterLab interface, and is configured to spin up a notebook server when the image is run, which can be done via the following command (optionally changing PORT to localhost port you'd like to run the notebook server on):

PORT=8888 docker run -p $PORT:8888 rigetti/forest-notebook

This will start the container, and somewhere in the terminal output it will print a URL that looks something like the following, but with TOKEN replaced with a long string of letters and numbers:

http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=TOKEN

Copy paste the above URL into your browser, replacing 8888 with PORT. This will bring up the JupyterLab interface, with the root directory of the filesystem being the top-level directory of the pyQuil repository. You can then run the notebooks in the examples directory, or create your own. These notebooks will have access to the latest quilc and QVM servers, which are running in the background. Happy quantum programming!

Creating a Binder repository using this image

One of the most exciting recent applications of a Jupyter-backed Docker image is Binder, which provides a free hosting service and executable environment for a repository of Jupyter notebooks. Binder can be configured many ways, but the most advanced configuration is via a custom Dockerfile. To create a Binder that has access to the full Forest quantum programming suite, add the following Dockerfile to the repository of Jupyter notebooks that you'd like to turn into an interactive web application:

# build image from a tagged forest-notebook image
FROM rigetti/forest-notebook:3.0.0

# copy over files from binder repository into $HOME
COPY . ${HOME}

# set working directory to $HOME
WORKDIR ${HOME}

Once you've added the Dockerfile, follow the instructions in the Binder link above to create your very own interactive quantum programming environment!

For some examples of existing Forest-backed Binder repositories, check out the following:

• rigetti/forest-tutorials: Interactive tutorial notebooks for pyQuil and the Forest quantum programming SDK.
• rigetti/qcs-paper: Supplementary interactive notebooks from the paper on Quantum Cloud Services.
• karalekas/stanford-cs269q: Lecture notebook from Stanford's course on quantum computer programming.
• exeter-quantum/senior-project: Notebooks from a quantum computing senior project at Phillips Exeter Academy.