Xanadu awarded DARPA grant to develop novel quantum compiler for NISQ-based machines

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Jul 20, 2021, 08:00 ET

PennyLane (https://pennylane.ai), the company's hardware-agnostic quantum software library, will be central to the team's work.

TORONTO, July 20, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Xanadu (https://xanadu.ai), a full-stack quantum computing company developing quantum hardware and software solutions, has been awarded a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant. The grant will enable Xanadu to develop a unique general-purpose "circuit-cutting" compiler which can automatically break down a circuit into a multi-circuit hybrid model—leveraging both classical and quantum computing—which will be ideal for near-term quantum computers.

"With PennyLane, these complex hybrid models can be run for the user seamlessly on the quantum hardware or simulators of their choice." said Nathan Killoran, who heads up Xanadu's Quantum Software & Algorithms team. "Using these tools, we plan to run quantum algorithms which would natively require 100+ qubits using quantum hardware and simulators containing only 10-30 qubits."

Xanadu created one of the world's first open-source software platforms for quantum computers, known as PennyLane (https://pennylane.ai). PennyLane allows users to connect quantum computing hardware and software from key hardware vendors, including Xanadu, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, Google, IonQ, Rigetti, and Microsoft.

Xanadu will leverage the expertise of its in-house team of dedicated quantum programmers and scientists, whose work in quantum computing is globally recognized, to carry out the DARPA-funded research project over a twenty-four-month period. "If successful, this project will have a wide impact on the entire community working with present-day quantum computers," said Christian Weedbrook, the company's founder and CEO. "It will allow everyone to run larger-scale quantum computations than they currently can—without needing access to more powerful quantum processors."

This is Xanadu's second grant from DARPA, after successfully completing an initial grant on quantum machine learning using PennyLane.

About Xanadu

Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu is building a fault tolerant quantum computer using silicon photonic hardware and offers users access to near-term quantum devices through the Xanadu Quantum Cloud.

www.xanadu.ai

SOURCE Xanadu