Introducing a Technical Steering Committee for OpenQASM
By Lev Bishop (IBM), Steven Heidel (AWS), Bettina Heim (Microsoft), Ali Javadi (IBM), Blake Johnson (IBM), and Philipp Schindler (University of Innsbruck)
In December of 2020, the Qiskit team announced OpenQASM3, the next version of the OpenQASM language that allows for the expressing a broader family of quantum circuits. In particular, OpenQASM allows for dynamic circuits that blend quantum operations with classical computations. In April of 2021, we followed up with a preprint manuscript that explained many of the design decisions that went into crafting the OpenQASM3 specification. Today, we take the next major step. In collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and the University of Innsbruck we are forming a technical steering committee (TSC) to guide future evolution and encourage adoption of the OpenQASM language.
We are still in the early days of OpenQASM and quantum computing as a whole. We expect the language to continue to evolve as we learn about the best ways to control and program quantum computers to extract the promised utility of these machines. There will be many opportunities to contribute ideas through pull requests or joining working groups that propose changes to the language.
Forming the technical steering committee will provide transparent and lightweight processes for the inclusion of contributions to OpenQASM that are centered around consensual solutions. These processes ensure that the broad community can shape the future of OpenQASM, giving individuals and organizations confidence that their contributions will be valued and considered.
We believe that a language can have a broader impact than a specific python toolkit. Consequently, the TSC will also be a point of contact for other frameworks and libraries to integrate OpenQASM into their projects. Adopting OpenQASM will allow for interoperability between projects in the growing quantum software open source community. This serves a similar purpose as some other recent projects in non-quantum problem domains, like how the MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation) project aims to unify different kinds of heterogenous compute within the LLVM compiler project, and ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) aims to unify the plethora of machine learning model expressions. We hope to do something similar in the domain of quantum circuit expression, providing a common layer to allow the community to focus on the main innovations, e.g. in hardware, compilers, algorithms, and for the combined efforts to add together.
The TSC consists of six members: Lev Bishop (IBM), Steven Heidel (AWS), Bettina Heim (Microsoft), Ali Javadi (IBM), Blake Johnson (IBM), and Philipp Schindler (University of Innsbruck). The TSC meets once every two weeks and their meetings are open to contributors that demonstrate sustained involvement in the project. The rules are fairly light weight and aim to balance maintaining a clear, consistent vision for the language with a straightforward process for others to propose changes.
We’re looking forward to creating an open and capable quantum assembly language for all quantum hardware, together. Contributions are welcome and encouraged
