Internet giant Baidu has unveiled its first superconducting quantum computer, the Qian Shi. The Chinese offer hardware and software from a single source.
At the Quantum Create 2022 quantum developer conference in Beijing, the Chinese Internet company and Google competitor Baidu announced its first superconducting quantum computer. According to the announcement, Qian Shi – Chinese for “the origin of all things is in the sky” – works with 10 qubits and is intended primarily to serve as a research and development platform for quantum computing applications.
Hardware and software from a single source
For the widest possible deployment, Baidu has developed a software stack and poured it into a cross-platform quantum hardware-software integration solution called Liang Xi. The stack includes Quanlse, a cloud-based quantum control platform, Quantum Leaf, a cloud-native quantum computing platform, QNET, a quantum network toolkit, QEP, a quantum error processing toolkit, and Paddle Quantum, a quantum machine learning platform.
“With Qian Shi and Liang Xi, users can create quantum algorithms and harness the power of quantum computing without having to develop their own quantum hardware, control systems, or programming languages,” said Dr. Runyao Duan, head of the Quantum Computing Institute at Baidu Research in the announcement. The platform is also compatible with a wide range of quantum chips, allowing for “plug-and-play” access.
In addition, Baidu’s quantum computing hardware lab is already working on a successor to Qian Shi. It has recently completed the development of a 36-qubit superconducting quantum chip with couplers, showing promising simulation results in key areas
Last year, iX dealt extensively with the topic of quantum computing in an iX Special Quantum Computer.
(avr)