Give your feedback on the state of the art in quantum open source with the Unitary Fund Survey

The following is a guest post by Nathan Shammah, CTO of the Unitary Fund.

At Unitary Fund we’d like to invite the PennyLane community to take the Quantum Open Source Software (QOSS) Survey. The main objective of the QOSS Survey is to collect a dataset representative of everyone who codes or wants to code for — and with — quantum technologies, in order to better serve users of the quantum computing ecosystem.

The QOSS ecosystem: SDKs, simulators, application tools & cloud services

The QOSS ecosystem has grown rapidly in the last few years, with hundreds of personal and collaborative projects. These projects span from Full Stack Development Kits (SDKs) and Simulators to more specialized Application Tools. Moreover, a new web architecture has arisen, allowing users to use Cloud Services to access quantum processing units (QPUs) or high-performance computing (HPC) classical simulators.

The need for an ecosystem-wide survey of quantum open source

While many product-feedback surveys exist, this marks the first community-wide survey for the Quantum Open Source Software ecosystem and community as a whole. For this reason, we believe it’s important to start taking this ecosystem-wide snapshot, and we’re sure that interesting findings will come out of it by tracking changes year after year — this is only the beginning!

We are also interested in having a picture of the diversity and inclusivity of the QOSS community, how it fares with respect to quantum technologies more broadly, and what actions can be taken to improve it.

You have until September 23rd, 2022 to complete the survey, and we plan to publish the aggregated results shortly after on the Unitary Fund website.

Make your voice heard: take the survey and spread the word

Please take no more than eight minutes to answer the anonymous QOSS survey. The target audience is anyone that is a user or developer of software for any quantum technology. By submitting the survey, you’ll make your voice heard with regards to questions touching quantum software stacks and specific quantum open-source projects — you can even list yours here! You can also provide feedback on the importance of documentation, maintenance, community support, and integration of tools in the stack.

The survey addresses questions such as:

• Are you a user, contributor, maintainer or project owner of a quantum software project?
• What quantum-computing cloud services have you used in the past year?
• When you choose a full-stack development platform and simulator, how important is its maintainability? And the documentation, performance, and ease of use?

Would you like to contribute to the survey? Then don’t hesitate and help us spread the word!

Unitary Fund and Xanadu: working for a wider QOSS community

At Unitary Fund we’re supporting the QOSS community with various programs and projects. Xanadu is a supporting member, and we cherish the time PennyLane, Strawberry Fields and FlamingPy developers put into volunteering for the microgrant program as advisors and into the unitaryHACK hackathon as maintainers.

Mitiq’s quantum error mitigation toolkit is integrated with PennyLane to provide a simple way to apply zero-noise extrapolation — a quantum error mitigation technique — using PennyLane. You can find out more about it in our previous blog post.

Keep on (quantum) coding! 😉