Maintaining open source quantum software for better UX

View profile for David Ryan

Quantum Computing and Deep Tech Developer Tools.

Another one of my Friday night quantum software sessions. Every few weeks I excuse myself from whatever it is that exciting people do, and spend the night fixing some bugs in open source quantum computing software. The sounds altruistic, but it's extremely selfish, as I get to see the architecture patterns and approaches of other product teams. I also get to see the handiwork of wicked smart humans on those teams (such as Jordan Sullivan and the Unitary Foundation crew working on the UCC compiler collection). This week's musing is: Quantum computing software is at a curious tipping point. In previous years, it has been built by "Quantum Physicist who also codes", so it might not always follow the kinds of patterns and approaches that those of us from enterprise software might expect. And certainly things like UX and UI were utterly irrelevant to the academic-oriented developer. But then that line blurred. Quantum physicists did their time on the tools and became great engineers (such as my collaborator Anastasia). Engineering and technical product designers from my side of the fence climbed over and joined in too. Looking at the likes of Classiq or Q-CTRL you can see the bar is raised above SaaS standards and topics like UX are taken seriously. As they should be. Below is a screenshot of an open source project I forked and fixed a bunch of broken dependencies tonight. This is the workflow screen in Covalent, which was a promising quantum+HPC orchestration tool, but the quantum side appears abandoned since the parent company was acquired. I might even keep maintaining a fork of this (Apache 2.0 to the rescue), as it's too nice to give over to entropy, and it's nice to have an open source alternative to relying on IBM/Amazon for hybrid workflows (and in fact we might open source our orchestration agent here at Marqov to help others control Covalent/Slurm/Kubernetes, etc). TLDR? Quantum software is nearing the UX/DX quality level of developer tools for IaaS/SaaS, but too easily abandoned when one vendor gets acquired or loses interest. But poses a useful resource and opportunity for a collection of independent vendors to maintain. We just need "a few Red Hat" to come together to do just that.

  • graphical user interface, application
David Q. L.

CS Professor; PI, Purdue Research Computing, Quantum AI Cybersecurity Blockchain, NSF I-Corps & ABET

4d

Coding is fun! What did you study in college, not in your profile?

You’re absolutely right, quantum software is finally shifting from “physicists who code” into disciplined product engineering. But longevity is the real gap: too many promising tools get abandoned after acquisitions. The opportunity now is for an open-source coalition, a “Red Hat for quantum” to ensure innovation survives beyond single vendors.

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