Q-CTRL Releases a New Version of Boulder Opal with More AI and Better Performance

Boulder Opal is a software tool provided by Q-CTRL for sophisticated quantum users and developers to automate and optimize quantum hardware performance by working to eliminate sources of noise, suppress errors and drift, improve gate fidelities, reduce crosstalk, and improve gate speed. A major activity is to tune and calibrate the pulses that control the qubits to provide optimum performance. In the past, this was performed manually but with the number of qubits constantly increasing and the number of potential interactions increasing at an exponential rate, it has becoming impossible for anyone to do this manually and an automated approach is required. Boulder Opal is one such Python-based program that does this and allows for cutting the time to perform a machine calibration from hours or days to just minutes. Boulder Opal has been utilizing AI technology in order to achieve this. The software is hardware agnostic and can work with many different types of quantum computing and quantum sensing hardware.

With this new version of Boulder Opal, Q-CTRL has expanded the use of AI from routines that would optimize individual gates to a larger approach that provides with full AI-driven scheduling of system tune-up and optimization. This new architecture automates the full process and invoke the various individual optimization tasks as appropriate.

A second key feature in this new version of Boulder Opal is to re-architect it to use a hybrid cloud/on-premise approach that will help reduce internet latencies in the process. The individual tasks will be performed in a low-latency local installation while utilizing a high-performance cloud resources for the more complex AI decisions. In conjunction with this, Q-CTRL has greatly increased the overall power of their cloud computing capabilities which will allow them to process more complex AI algorithms, with greater throughput while servicing more users.

Additional information about this new release of Boulder Opal is available in a blog posting on the Q-CTRL website here along with a product page for the software here.

March 1, 2023