Building The Quantum Ecosystem with Qiskit, Unitary Fund, and IonQ
By Coleman Collins, Qiskit Advocate and Sr. Product Manager at IonQ
Quantum developers are hard at work hacking for unitaryHACK, a two week distributed bounty program encouraging both novice and advanced contributors to participate in quantum open-source software. Contributors have the chance to earn prizes and gain knowledge by contributing to their favorite projects. While industrious open-source hackers have claimed more than $750 of over $7,500 in total prizes, there’s more to be won.
The hackathon is more than halfway over — it runs from June 3rd to the 17th, 2022 — and has featured cross-pollination in the quantum open-source software community, attention on less-familiar projects in the ecosystem, and a flurry of great pull requests from all corners of the globe. While we’ve already seen some great contributions, the largest bounty for qiskit-ionq is still up for grabs: a contribution that integrates the custom gates exposed as part of IonQ’s native gateset interface with Qiskit’s extensive compilation and optimization toolchain.
But first, let me tell you a little more about unitaryHACK. Each participating project has selected a variety of improvements they’d like to see and assigned a cash bounty of anywhere between $25 and $200 for a pull request that successfully makes that improvement, paid by Unitary Fund and made possible by their sponsors. These improvements range from challenging, low-level changes like implementing a quantum key distribution simulation in QuNetSim, to great “first issues” like supporting more readable documentation in KQCircuits or improving contribution tooling in Covalent.
Qiskit itself is participating in the event, with bounties out for Qiskit Terra and Qiskit Nature ranging from improved type hinting to major refactoring. PRs have started rolling in, although there are several bounties still up for grabs.
As a Qiskit partner, IonQ maintains a small piece of the larger Qiskit ecosystem, a provider package that lets users write quantum circuits in Qiskit and run them on IonQ hardware and simulators. We’re also participating in unitaryHACK, sponsoring bounties for the qiskit-ionq provider, with the goal of not only making Qiskit more hardware-agnostic, but supporting Qiskit in providing optimal performance on a variety of hardware architectures.
When the IonQ and Qiskit teams were discussing participation in the hack, Qiskit Partner Program Lead Nate Earnest-Noble’s constant refrain was “Let’s enable new groups of people to get involved as easily as possible by working on the community’s needs.” That’s exactly the spirit we’re all bringing to the table. Events like this are not only a great opportunity to encourage folks to tackle long-desired improvements, but to come together as believers in — and drivers of — a quantum future.
So, what are we asking for? Well, IonQ users can already manually build circuits in Qiskit using the custom gate types, which allows for lower-level access critical to experimenting with techniques like zero-noise extrapolation, mirror benchmarking, and more. However, manual compilation and transpilation makes using existing examples and toolchains more challenging and painstaking than it needs to be. Integrating with Qiskit’s transpilation and compilation tools would allow Qiskit users to more simply run with native gates on IonQ hardware. It would also allow future Qiskit developers and users to build optimization and transpilation tools, create more efficient compilations, build new tooling for things like error mitigation, and generally play lower in the stack.
IonQ also has a remaining open “catchall bounty” to encourage creative contributors to bring their own ideas to the party. This might include creating demo notebooks leveraging the qiskit-ionq provider to do something interesting — maybe using Unitary’s own Mitiq for error mitigation, using PyGSTi for low-level benchmarking, or re-executing one of the many Qiskit Nature tutorials using IonQ hardware. Perhaps users can make more direct contributions like extended noise model support in QuantumInstance or client-side circuit list support. We’re excited to see what participants might come up with.
There’s still some time left in the hack, and we highly encourage anyone interested in participating to come help tackle these bounties. You can sign up and read more instructions about how to participate here. Even if you’ve never contributed to something like this, we’ll happily team up with you to shape your approach and ultimate PR — you can find me on the Qiskit Slack (see the #partners-ionq channel) or on the Unitary Fund Discord.
Even if you’re reading this after the hack, we’d love for you to contribute, and would be happy to help you find a good issue to tackle. While unitaryHACK is just two weeks, a vibrant quantum open source community is a year-round proposition.
