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Resource Estimation Challenge at QRISE 2024: Recap
This spring, we partnered with Quantum Coalition to offer a challenge at QRISE 2024 - a six-week-long event aiming to get students started doing research projects in areas of interest in quantum computing industry. Meet the challenge winners and learn about their projects!
Integrated Hybrid Support in the Azure Quantum Development Kit
Some quantum computers can do more than execute a static sequence of gates. The most advanced ones can perform mid-circuit measurements, conditionally execute gates, perform real-time classical computations and re-use qubits. If you want to experiment with these state-of-the-art capabilities, we have good news for you. The Azure Quantum Development Kit now supports running hybrid quantum programs on hardware targets. This kind of program combines classical and quantum computations; thus, we refer to them as hybrid quantum programs. Last year, we released Azure Quantum’s Integrated Hybrid feature, enabling user...
Evaluating cat qubits for fault-tolerant quantum computing using Azure Quantum Resource Estimator
Introduction This blog post highlights a recent collaboration between Microsoft and Alice & Bob, a French startup whose goal is to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer by leveraging a superconducting qubit called a cat qubit. In this collaboration, Alice & Bob uses the new extensibility mechanisms of Microsoft’s Resource Estimator to obtain resource estimates for their cat qubit architecture. The Resource Estimator is a tool that can help evaluate the practical benefit of quantum algorithms. It calculates an estimate for the expected runtime and the number of physical qubits needed to run a given pro...
Circuit Diagrams with Q#
If you’ve been exploring quantum programming using Q#, you may have been thinking, “This language is great and so easy to use! But what about visual learners?” I’m a software engineer in the Azure Quantum Development Kit team, and I’m very excited to share a new feature I’ve been working on: circuit visualization in Q#. One of the neat things about Q# is that it gives you the ability to express quantum algorithms in a procedural language that’s reminiscent of classical programming languages such as C and Python. If you’re already a programmer, this way of thinking will be very intuitive to you, and you can ...
Exploring space-time tradeoffs with Azure Quantum Resource Estimator
Introduction We are delighted to present a new experience for exploring space-time tradeoffs recently added to the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator. Available both as Azure Quantum Development Kit (VS Code extension) and a Python package, it adds a new dimension to estimates. Resource estimation doesn't just yield a single group of numbers (one per objective), but rather multiple points representing tradeoffs between objectives, such as qubit number and runtime. Our recent update of the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator adds methods for finding such tradeoffs for a given quantum algorithm and a given quantum c...
Design Fault Tolerant Quantum Computing applications with the open-source Resource Estimator
We are excited to announce that following its initial release the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator is now open-source. It has been integrated with the Modern QDK making it run up to 100x faster, and running across PC, Mac, Linux or from your web browser. Try it now. Why is resource estimation relevant today? Quantum computing has the potential for widespread societal and scientific impact, and many applications have been proposed for quantum computers. The quantum community has reached a consensus that NISQ machines do not offer practical quantum advantage and that it is time to graduate to the next of the thre...
Announcing v1.0 of the Azure Quantum Development Kit
Today we are excited to announce the 1.0 release of the Azure Quantum Development Kit, which we often refer to simply as "the QDK". As outlined in an earlier blog post, this is a significant re-write over the prior QDK with an emphasis on speed, simplicity, and a delightful experience. Review that post for the technical details on how we rebuilt it, but at a product level the re-write has enabled us to make some incredible improvements that exceeded the expectations we set out with, some highlights being: And much more! This post will include lots of video clips to try and high...
Interning at Microsoft Quantum – 2024
We announce Microsoft Quantum research internships for summer 2024 and share some completed intern projects from this summer.
Defining logical qubits: Criteria for Resilient Quantum Computation
As an industry, we are all collectively committed to bringing scaled quantum computing to fruition. Understanding what it will take to reach this goal is crucial not just for measuring industry progress, but also for developing a robust strategy to build a quantum machine and a quantum-ready community. That’s why in June 2023, we offered how quantum computing must graduate through three implementation levels to achieve utility scale: Level 1 Foundational, Level 2 Resilient, Level 3 Scale. All quantum computing technologies today are at Level 1, and while numerous NISQ machines have been developed, they do not of...