New Software Releases: TensorFlow Quantum v2, Quantify-Core 0.5, and Cirq 1.0 Roadmap

TensorFlow Quantum is an open source library for quantum machine learning originally released by Google in 2020. It is a follow-on to the original TensorFlow program written for classical computers that was released in 2017. It offers high-level abstractions for the design and training of both discriminative and generative quantum models under TensorFlow and supports high-performance quantum circuit simulators. It allow one to rapidly prototype quantum ML models. Version 2 contains a number of new features including bigger gate fusions, GPU CUDA support, adjoint differentiation, noisy simulations and more. An updated white paper that describes TensorFlow Quantum along with the new features is available here, a web page that contains several videos that help explain it is available here, and the GitHub repository for Tensor Flow Quantum is available here.

Quantify-Core is open source software developed by Qblox and Orange Quantum Systems to provide a tool for data acquisition for quantum computing and solid-state physics experiments. New version 0.5 has been released with a number of new features. For details you can view a short release announcement here, the changelog for the software here, and the user guide here.

Cirq is a Python software library for writing, manipulating, and optimizing quantum circuits, and then running them on quantum computers and quantum simulators. Cirq provides useful abstractions for dealing with today’s noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers, where details of the hardware are vital to achieving state-of-the-art results. Although it was originally written to support Google's own superconducting based quantum computer, various backends have been written to support other machines such as the machines from Rigetti, IonQ, and AQT. To provide for better visibility for Cirq users, Google has published a roadmap for Cirq 1.0 that describes specific developments with classifcations that separate them into Released, Finished, We're Working on It, and Planned. You can view this roadmap here, a web page that provides various tutorials and overviews here, and the GitHub page here.

September 4, 2021