Quantum developers can now use the Microsoft Quantum Computing stack with Python. In a move that will be sure to excite the community and aid cooperativity between languages and frameworks. New support in Azure Quantum allows for major quantum Python SDKs so developers can directly submit quantum circuits built with Qiskit (championed by IBM) and Cirq (championed by Google).
“It’s great to see the adoption of Cirq following the spirit of the Apache 2.0 open-source license and making further hardware platforms accessible to the global Cirq developer community.”
Dr. Markus Hoffmann, Quantum Partnerships at Google Quantum AI.
Microsoft has championed its own quantum language named Q# which has steadily gained in popularity. Of course, there are a number of languages and our recent article plotted the popularity of the main quantum languages and frameworks which showed that Qiskit is in the lead, followed by Q# and Cirq. This move will then help to pull more users away from other quantum cloud platforms – perhaps most notably IBM, we think.
Microsoft designed an integration API following patterns that are familiar to Qiskit and Cirq developers. Developers can then send their quantum circuits written with Qiskit or Cirq to Azure Quantum hardware partners such as Honeywell Quantum Solutions (which merged into Cambridge Quantum) and IonQ (which recently gained its own Wall Street listing).
“We at Strangeworks are very excited by Azure Quantum’s efforts to extend their unique quantum services to the Python community. Developers working with Azure Quantum now have unprecedented optionality to work in both Q# and Python, and to leverage the strengths across many frameworks, including Qiskit and Cirq, within the Quantum Development Kit,”
Justin Youens, Founder and CTO of Strangeworks.
Learn more about the projects by getting the quickstart for Qiskit and quickstart for Cirq. There you can also check out sample Jupyter Notebooks for Qiskit and Cirq. If you’re interested in innovative research with Azure Quantum, check out our Azure Quantum Credits program to receive up to $10,000 of credits to use the MS platform.
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