Overview

ACQDP is an open-source simulator-driven development tool for quantum algorithms and quantum computers. The initial release of ACQDP in October 2020 features Alibaba Quantum Laboratory’s general-purpose, tensor-contraction based quantum circuit simulator, together with some applications on quantum algorithm and error correction simulations. Some future directions of ACQDP of higher prioritites are

  1. Strengthening the capabilities of the simulator, in terms of the scale of the target circuits, and allowing approximations.

  2. Improving the capabilities for and expanding the scope of applications.

  3. Developing friendly user interfaces for both the educational and research communities.

  4. Adding utilities facilitating the deployment in various computing environments.

Installation

Prerequisites

Python - version 3.7 or later is required.

Cython (optional) - used in the acqdp to accelerate the software package KaHyPar used in contraction order finding. In a command window, run

pip install cython

boost - C++ boost library, particularly the program_options library

KaHyPar python package (Windows) - On non-Windows systems, it installs automatically when installing acqdp but it’ll error out on Windows. To make it work on Windows, you’ll need manually install Kahypar first following its instructions here. Alternatively, you can use Windows Subsystem for Linux

Installation from PyPI

ACQDP packages are published on the Python Package Index and can be installed using pip. This is the recommended way for most users. However, if you’d like to see or modify the source code, proceed to the next section Installation from source code

In a command window, run

pip install -U acqdp

Installation from source code

Alternatively, you can install from source code, say, cloned from Github so you can see and modify the code. First clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/alibaba/acqdp

Then install the ACQDP packages. Enter the acqdp folder and run

pip install -e .

Example and test codes

You are ready to go! Find some examples at https://github.com/alibaba/acqdp/tree/master/examples and https://github.com/alibaba/acqdp/tree/master/demo

To run the example in the examples, for example GHZ.py, simply run the following command in the examples folder:

python examples/GHZ.py

To see if the package passes all the tests, simply run python -m pytest.