IBM Quantum Platform

IBM Quantum Platform

Type of site	Cloud-based quantum computing
Owner	IBM
URL	quantum-computing.ibm.com
Registration	Required
Launched	May 2016; 7 years ago (2016-05)
Current status	Active

IBM Quantum Platform (previously known as IBM Quantum Experience) is an online platform allowing public and premium access to

• The service was launched in May 2016 as the IBM Quantum Experience[1] with a five-qubit quantum processor and matching simulator connected in a star shaped pattern. At this time, users could only interact with the hardware through the quantum composer GUI. Quantum circuits were also limited to the specific two-qubit gates available on the hardware.

• In July 2016, IBM launched the IBM Quantum Experience community forum. This was subsequently replaced by a Slack workspace.

• In January 2017, IBM made a number of additions to the IBM Quantum Experience,^[2] including increasing the set of two-qubit interactions available on the five-qubit quantum processor, expanding the simulator to custom topologies up to twenty qubits, and allowing users to interact with the device and simulator using quantum assembly language code.

• In March 2017, IBM released Qiskit^[3] to enable users to more easily write code and run experiments on the quantum processor and simulator. A user guide for beginners was also added.

• In May 2017, IBM made an additional 16-qubit processor available on the IBM Quantum service.^[4]

• In January 2018, IBM launched a quantum awards program, which it hosted on the IBM Quantum Experience.^[5]

• In May 2019 a large overhaul of the service was made, including the addition of web-hosted Jupyter notebooks and integration with the online and interactive Qiskit textbook.^[6]

• After a redesign in March 2021, a greater distinction was made between the composer GUI and the Jupyter notebooks. The IBM Quantum Experience name was retired in favour of the separate names IBM Quantum Composer and IBM Quantum Lab.^[7] Now its collectively called IBM Quantum Platform.

IBM Quantum Composer

The Quantum Composer is a

The composer can also be used in scripting mode, where the user can write programs in the OpenQASM-language instead. Below is an example of a very small program, built for IBMs 5-qubit computer. The program instructs the computer to generate a quantum state ${\displaystyle |\Psi \rangle ={\frac {1}{\sqrt {2}}}\left(|000\rangle +|111\rangle \right)}$, a 3-qubit

${\displaystyle |000\rangle }$

${\displaystyle |111\rangle }$

include "qelib1.inc"
qreg q[5];                // allocate 5 qubits (set automatically to |00000>)
creg c[5];                // allocate 5 classical bits

h q[0];                   // Hadamard-transform qubit 0
cx q[0], q[1];            // conditional pauli X-transform (ie. "CNOT") of qubits 0 and 1
                          // At this point we have a 2-qubit Bell state (|00> + |11>)/sqrt(2)

cx q[1], q[2];            // this expands entanglement to the 3rd qubit

measure q[0] -> c[0];     // this measurement collapses the entire 3-qubit state
measure q[1] -> c[1];     // therefore qubit 1 and 2 read the same value as qubit 0
measure q[2] -> c[2];

Every instruction in the QASM language is the application of a

• In 2018 IBM reported that there were over 80,000 users of the IBM Quantum Experience, who have collectively run over 3 million experiments.[9]

• Many academic papers have been published by researchers who have conducted experiments using the service.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]}

References