New Quantum Intermediate Representation Alliance Formed

One trend we have seen in the quantum industry over the past year or two is the increased emphasis on developing hardware agnostic software and create software platforms that can generate code for a variety of different quantum computers. This is a tremendously positive thing for end users because it allows them to easily try out their programs on several different quantum computers to see which one works the best for them. This capability is particularly important now because the hardware ecosystem is currently changing very fast with new processors being introduced every month. So, an end user should want to maintain as much flexibility as they can.

Sixty years ago in the classical computing industry, a problem started to crop up with the Fortran programming language. Each manufacturer offered their own version and converting a program from one machine to the next became challenging. So, in1966 the American Standards Association released its first standard for the language which they called Fortran '66 (also known as Fortran IV) and they have been developing updated standards for it ever since.

Now the quantum industry is starting to do the same thing. The Linux Foundation has just announced they are forming a QIR Alliance (Quantum Intermediate Representation Alliance) that will work to establish an intermediate representation for quantum circuits with the goal to facilitate interoperability within the quantum ecosystem and provide a representation suitable for current and future heterogenous quantum processors. The Quantum Intermedia Representation will be built on top of the LLVM intermediate language standard used in the classical computing. Founding members of the QIR Alliance include Honeywell, Microsoft, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Quantum Circuits Inc. and Rigetti Computing.

What is interesting to us is that there are at least three other seemingly similar efforts also underway. IBM has established a Technical Steering Committee for OpenQasm3 that includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the University of Innsbruck, and Microsoft. (Note that Microsoft is a member of both). Riverlane has introduced a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) specification for creating a programming model to facilitate portable programs and established a consortium in the UK to help develop it. And also, the Quantum Economic Development Corporation (QED-C) has held workshops on something called PIRQ to develop a languge to facility program portability.

At this point, it is not clear to us how all of these different efforts will shake out. Some of these standards may not necessarily conflict with one another. In fact, it may be possible that one ends up as a subset of another. It's possible that some of these efforts may merge or that multiple standards will coexist in the marketplace much like we have today with classical programming languages. And finally, it's also possible that some of these efforts may be abandoned. We don't know for sure which scenario will occur and we believe it will take several years before this situation stabilizes. It will be interesting to watch in the meantime.

For more on this new QIR Alliance, you can view a press release provided by the Linux Foundation here and also visit the GitHub page for the QIR Alliance which you can find here.

November 30, 2021