Celebrating 2020, Qiskit’s Best Year Yet
Tags: Open Source, Quantum Computing, Python, Programming, Qiskit

By the Qiskit Team… and You!

2020 represented the Qiskit community’s most successful year yet, even amid the challenges. More Qiskitters are learning quantum computing, participating in events, and making the field better than ever before, while contributing their individual expertise and experiences from around the globe. We’re proud to be a part of this community, and wanted to take some time to celebrate some of this year’s achievements.

“When we started this Qiskit community mission over two years ago, I could never have dreamed both the team and our ability to make a global impact would have grown so rapidly,” said Liz Durst, Director of the IBM Quantum & Qiskit Community team.

Qiskit is an open-source software development kit for quantum computers, used by all sorts of interested folks hoping to get a taste of quantum computing and its potential benefits. Today, Qiskit is now the largest quantum computing community in the world, with over 15,000 scientists and developers actively working in the field using our tools and over 300,000 people using Qiskit resources to learn the fundamentals of quantum computation. Putting these numbers into perspective, the 2020 survey from the American Physical Society’s Division of Quantum Information shows only 2,732 members conducting research in this area. While this core audience remains small, our community shows an enormous demand and opportunity to develop an inclusive quantum workforce if we focus now to bring career opportunities and training to as many as we can reach.

This year, Qiskit helped researchers dig into some of the most important questions in quantum computing. They used Qiskit’s noise simulator to investigate different variational algorithms’ resilience to noise, propose new methods for high-fidelity readout, and used Qiskit Pulse to optimize circuits at an even finer level. Researchers even wondered whether they could use Qiskit’s quantum machine learning framework as a way to study COVID data, explored the frontiers of condensed matter physics by making an exciton condensate, and made Rothko-inspired generative art.

Meanwhile, our open source community worked to make Qiskit even better. 250 Qiskitters made over 2500 commits on GitHub. The Qiskit team debuted a new optimization module, chemistry module, and announced upcoming projects like Qiskit Metal and OpenQASM3 — all open source, of course. They also managed to make the code significantly faster than it was in previous releases by optimizing it to be more efficient, and by starting a new independent library called retworkx used at the core of the code. The team has also made Qiskit more backend-agnostic.

“We have always strived for Qiskit to be a common tool that can be used for any quantum computer, but given its history, it has always had a bit of a bias toward IBM Quantum’s devices,” said Matthew Treinish, software developer on the Qiskit team. “In 2020, we’ve made a lot of improvements to both the providers interface which serves as the layer between Qiskit and hardware as well as the transpiler to make it easier for people to have any quantum computer work well with Qiskit. I expect this trend will continue forward into 2021.”

Qiskit now offers more control over the hardware it’s running on than ever before, making it even easier to perform experiments on quantum devices. “Qiskit Pulse development continued strong in 2020. At less than two years of age, our open source, low-level quantum programming model has rapidly matured into an expressive interface that blurs the line between circuit and pulse programming,” said Lauren Capelluto, Quantum Software Engineer at IBM Research.

It’s important to acknowledge that this year wasn’t all smiles and successes. In June, the police killing of George Floyd once again highlighted the injustices faced by our Black community members. We’re proud of how our community banded together to fight for what’s right and support our Black colleagues, hosting discussions on how to build a more welcoming community, making a donation to the Audre Lorde Project, updating our Code of Conduct, and doing even more work internally. But we’re still learning, and acknowledge that we can, and will be doing more in 2021.

Supporting our community means branching out to welcome new members excited to adopt Quantum Computing, too. We’re proud to have launched the IBM-HBCU Quantum Center, offering thirteen Historically Black Colleges and Universities access to IBM quantum computers via the cloud, educational support for students learning to use Qiskit, and funding for undergraduate and graduate research. Over 1,000 quantum novices took part in our Qiskit Challenge India, an opportunity to learn the basics of Quantum Machine Learning in a country currently amid a quantum boom. We hosted an Novemberfest in Europe, professor meetups, and another IBM Quantum Challenge in collaboration with Keio University in Tokyo.

Some of our newest community members are only just beginning their quantum journey via education, and this year, we reached more quantum learners than ever before. Back in July, over 4,000 students globally met in a dedicated Discord server to take the same two-week Quantum Computing Summer School we host for our IBM Quantum interns. We think that we set the standard for online quantum computing education, and are still seeing the Summer School’s impacts as bonds formed over the summer have turned into new university Quantum Clubs and other community-driven initiatives. During October, we turned our sights toward high school and early-college learners by teaming up with The Coding School to offer a free year-long quantum computing course to 7,500 students. Learners in the community continue to improve our educational resources, including our open-source interactive Qiskit textbook.

We also hosted plenty of events; from our Summer School to our Hackathon Global, our Summer Jam, and other smaller events. Virtual events let us connect in ways we never thought we could connect before, now across continents and across time zones.

Even outside of events, there were ample opportunities for our community members to interact in meaningful ways. Qiskitters joined us on YouTube for our Seminar Series and watched Coding with Qiskit. Thousands of community members met in the Qiskit Slack channel and even in their own Discord servers and on twitter. Others shared their personal stories on LinkedIn or their personal blogs, and wrote stories for the Qiskit blog (which, if you ever want to write for, please pitch us here!)

This year was truly one of resilience for our entire community. We hope you’ll stick along with us, and that one day we can see all of you in person again!