Celebrating 7 years

of Qiskit

Before 2016, quantum computers exist in laboratories, but are only available for on-site researchers to work with. With IBM Quantum Experience, IBM makes a real quantum computer available over the internet for the first time, launching a new era of quantum exploration.

IBM researchers publish a paper on arXiv describing the Open Quantum Assembly Language (OpenQASM), an interface language enabling experiments with small-depth quantum circuits. The first public release is OpenQASM v2.0.

IBM researchers release software packages for Qiskit.

• Qiskit Terra, which would eventually become today’s Qiskit SDK, was the core software for building circuits.
• Qiskit Aqua was focused on applying Qiskit to specific domain use cases, and is now available as separate community application modules.
• Qiskit Ignis provided early explorations on error mitigation.
• Qiskit Aer is also introduced at this time to support quantum computing simulations. It continues to provide world-leading open-source quantum simulation tools.

Qiskit gains support for a five-qubit trapped ion device at the University of Innsbruck hosted by Alpine Quantum Technologies. This marks the first third-party hardware provider on Qiskit.

Thanks to new transpilation capabilities between superconducting and trapped-ion gate sets, users gain the ability to write once for multiple architectures.

The new version of the population programming language introduces new capabilities, including support for dynamic circuits. Before dynamic circuits, every quantum execution was a series of gates followed by a measurement. Dynamic circuits introduces in-stream measurements that vastly extend the possibilities of quantum computation. For more details, read the paper.

A set of primitives called Estimator and Sampler are introduced to Qiskit Runtime. These primitives further simplify quantum executions, and make the latest optimizations more readily available to users.