D-Wave open sources quantum software development tool qbsolv

D-Wave releases problem-solving tool to open source in a bid to build quantum development environment

D-Wave Systems, one of a handful of companies attempting to develop computers based on quantum physics, has released an open-source quantum software tool in a bid to build up an eco-system of software and developers in the nascent quantum computing space.

The tool, called qbsolv, enables developers to build higher-level tools and applications based on quantum computing systems developed by D-Wave, without the need to (fully) understand the complex physics behind quantum computers.

Qbsolv is used to solve large optimization problems. It works by breaking them down into smaller segments that can run individually on D-Wave's quantum processor. It then re-combines the individual answers into one overall solution.

D-Wave and qbsolv have been used in a number of particular applications, including by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who used qbsolv with a D-Wave system to find better ways of splitting the molecules on which they performed electronic structure calculations.

Scott Pakin, a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has built a quantum macro assembler, available on GitHub, that leverages qbsolv to create programs that would otherwise be too large to implement on the D-Wave system.

D-Wave claims that qbsolv enables users to solve problems up to twenty times larger than could be solved on a D-Wave processor without using qbsolv and, as D-Wave scales up the power of its technology, the size of problem-solving that qbsolv can handle ought to scale up as well.

The tool along with documentation has been uploaded to open-source software development portal Github.

"Just as a software ecosystem helped to create the immense computing industry that exists today, building a quantum computing industry will require software accessible to the developer community," said Bo Ewald, president of D-Wave International.

He added: "D-Wave is building a set of software tools that will allow developers to use their subject-matter expertise to build tools and applications that are relevant to their business or mission. By making our tools open source, we expand the community of people working to solve meaningful problems using quantum computers."

To encourage widespread use of the tool, qbsolv is designed to ingest data in a quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation (QUBO) format that ought to be familiar and accessible to application developers.