China’s Baidu Inc. unveiled a new cloud-based quantum computing platform called Quantum Leaf that is designed to program, model, and perform quantum tasks.
Baidu is one of a range of large technology companies that are rushing to create quantum computing, relying on quantum-mechanical processes such as superposition and entanglement to conduct computing. Technology hopes to usher in a new generation in computing and up-to-date fields such as artificial intelligence, cryptography, and physics.
Quantum Leaf is fundamentally a software programming environment that offers quantum infrastructure-as-a-service. It is intended to supplement the Paddle Quantum Development Toolkit that Baidu revealed earlier this year. Centered on Baidu’s PaddlePaddle AI architecture, Paddle Quantum allows designers and scientists to easily construct and train quantum neural network models for specialized quantum computing applications.
Baidu said that one of the main components of Quantum Leaf is the QCompute design package, which comes with a hybrid programming language and a high-performance simulator. It allows users to use pre-built modules and artifacts to construct and execute quantum circuits in Quantum Leaf.
Baidu has unveiled a cloud-based quantum pulse computing service, called Quanlse, which is said to help bridge the difference between hardware and software by offering a way to plan and execute pulse sequences for quantum tasks. Pulse sequences are used to minimize the amount of error that occurs from decoherence or lack of device information. Quanlse will work with quantum computers centered on superconducting circuits or nuclear magnetic resonance, Baidu said. He said cloud services were jostling for a role in quantum computing well before the technology was mastered.
Workload capture does not take place on a hardware basis, but rather on a device design and platform basis, Mueller said. The announcement by Baidu about Paddle Quantum is not shocking. The code needs to be reviewed while it is being built and corporations will be able to do so on Baidu’s Quantum Leaf platforms.
As Mueller points out, Baidu is one of the cloud technology vendors providing cloud-based quantum computing services. Amazon Web Services Inc. offers cloud connectivity to quantum machines designed by D-Wave Systems Inc., IonQ Inc., and Rigetti Computing Inc. through its AWS Braket program. In the meantime, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud has a related application called Azure Quantum that provides access to quantum processors designed by IonQ, Honeywell International Inc., and Quantum Circuits Inc.
Google and IBM Corp. have both designed their own proprietary hardware-based quantum machines and made them available to researchers via cloud platforms.
