IBM's Evolution of Qiskit

Quantum Software is helping preparing young people for the Quantum jobs of the future.

Hello Everyone,

Time will tell if IBM’s Quantum computing ambitions come to fruition, but their impact on Quantum education and educating the workforce of tomorrow cannot be underestimated.

• Let’s think about it - Qiskit is a highly performant, fast, and efficient quantum software, yet one of its biggest strengths is you—the user and community.

• Qiskit is an open-source software development kit for working with quantum computers at the level of circuits, pulses, and algorithms.

• It provides tools for creating and manipulating quantum programs and running them on prototype quantum devices on IBM Quantum Platform or on simulators on a local computer and was developed by IBM Research.

On May 29th, 2024 IBM released Qiskit SDK v1.1.0.

Qiskit is also design to complement the utility-scale hardware that IBM is developing. The community and tools are also designed to promote a reliable influx of robust, collaborative projects, which they believe is part of the catalyst for future discoveries and for innovation to occur. IBM’s Qiskit thus leads the competition in a variety of factors that they attribute to the strong community, and those are Commits, Contributors, Forks, and Downloads.

On May 15th, 2024 IBM announced the 1.0 release of its Qiskit Software Development Kit (SDK) for building and visualizing quantum circuits.

Introduction to Qiskit

Qiskit, is among the most widely used quantum software platform, if not the most. Launched in 2017, Qiskit has grown from a simple software development kit (SDK) to a comprehensive quantum software stack.

• Today it anchors a vibrant open-source community of 550,000+ users responsible for 2,800+ research papers.

• It has 500 contributors and over 8k Commits

Qiskit is a beautiful idea, if you believe the Quantum computing industry will need more workers in the near future.

According to the PR:

Qiskit Upgrades of 2024

The expanded software stack of Qiskit includes:

• The stable release of Qiskit SDK v1.x for building, optimizing, and visualizing quantum circuits.

• AI-powered optimization of quantum circuits for quantum hardware, embedded in the Qiskit Transpiler Service.

• Simplified execution modes for the Qiskit Runtime Service which can be tailored for performant execution of quantum circuits on quantum hardware.

• The Qiskit Code Assistant, powered by watsonx-based generative AI models, to automate the development of quantum code

• The Qiskit Serverless open-source tool to run quantum-centric supercomputing workloads across quantum hardware and classical clusters.

There’s also a sense that AI is becoming more involved via Watsonx.

IBM boasts the biggest ecosystem and most resources for Quantum utility.