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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Up until now, most quantum programming frameworks have been written in Python, and serialize solely the quantum part of the workflow to simplistic string-based representations that are sent to cloud-connected quantum hardware (while the classical part executes locally!). But this ignores the history of classical programming infrastructure, and the fact that no algorithm is purely quantum — there is bound to be expensive and interwoven classical processing, and we need to take this into account.
In this talk, he’ll chat about how they are addressing this with PennyLane via Catalyst, a framework for quantum just-in-time compilation (QJIT). Using QJIT, full quantum-classical programs written in Python are automatically captured and compiled using standard compiler technologies such as MLIR and LLVM — leading to not only performance improvements, but increasingly richer ways we can interface with quantum computers.
Using this approach, he’ll then show how they can perform constant-time hybrid compilation of Shor’s algorithm; he will demonstrate that with QJIT compilation, the algorithm is compiled once per bit width of N, the integer being factored, even when N-specific optimizations are applied to circuit generation based on values determined at runtime. The implementation is benchmarked up to 32-bit, and both the size of the compiled program and the pure compilation time are found to be constant (under 3 seconds on a laptop computer), meaning code generation becomes tractable even for realistic problem sizes.
Bio: Josh Izaac holds a Ph.D. in graph algorithms for quantum computing, with a focus on software development and computational physics, from the University of Western Australia Following completion in 2017, he then moved to Toronto to take up a position at Xanadu, working across education, research, content, and software development. As Head of Quantum Software, he helped develop Xanadu’s open-source quantum software ecosystem, including Strawberry Fields, an open-source Python library for programming Xanadu’s early continuous-variable photonic hardware; PennyLane, an open-source differentiable quantum programming framework; and Catalyst, a just-in-time compiler for hybrid quantum-classical programs. Since 2022 he has been the Director of Product at Xanadu, leading high-level roadmap planning and strategy for Xanadu’s open-source quantum programming ecosystem across software, content, and cloud services, with the aim of enabling breakthrough research through novel software.
Host: Kasia, Krzyzanowska, MPA-Q