CLOUDS Lab @ Melbourne Releases Quantum Computing Simulator 1.0

The Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Lab and its iQuantum Initiative for Quantum Computing at the University of Melbourne is delighted to release an open source software for modelling and simulation of Quantum Computing environments.

iQuantum Initiative: Recent breakthroughs in Quantum hardware are creating opportunities for its use in many applications. However, Quantum software engineering is still in its infancy with many challenges, especially dealing with the diversity of Quantum programming languages and hardware platforms. To alleviate these challenges, our iQuantum Initiative at the University of Melbourne is investigating fundamental research challenges and developing software systems and tools for the advancement of Quantum Computing paradigm by supporting (1) rapid creation of applications and their deployments and (2) modelling and simulation of quantum computing environments.

As quantum computers become increasingly accessible through cloud services and potentially extend to edge networks in the future, the demand for efficient resource management strategies is paramount to ensure the efficient utilization of quantum computing resources. However, the limitations of employing practical quantum computing resources and the lack of quantum environment modeling toolkits have hindered the design and evaluation of quantum resource management policies. To address this challenge, we developed iQuantum, a lightweight and versatile discrete-event modeling and simulation toolkit (based on CloudSim 6.0) for quantum computing environments. iQuantum provides a set of quantum computing entities that can be customized and extended to support a wide range of different hybrid quantum computing environments, supporting research in quantum resource management (e.g., task scheduling, backend selection, hybrid task orchestration), designing and prototyping of quantum computing systems.

These days many commercial vendors are offering access to Quantum processors as part of their Cloud services. Therefore, iQuantum simulator capabilities integrated/developed with CloudSim framework provides immediate opportunity for Cloud researchers to include Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) in their research on resource management and application scheduling. Thus, Cloud researchers can become rapid innovators/contributors to this emerging field of Quantum Computing.

A link for downloading iQuantum technologies from:

http://clouds.cis.unimelb.edu.au/iquantum/

A direct link for downloading iQuantum simulator:

https://github.com/Cloudslab/iQuantum