Xanadu, a quantum computing and advanced AI company developing quantum hardware and software solutions, has been awarded a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant to enable the company undertake a comprehensive investigation of the performance of quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms on currently available quantum computing hardware.
“There is a strong crossover happening right now between quantum computing and AI,” said Nathan Killoran, head of Xanadu’s Quantum Machine Learning team.
“Many signature ideas and concepts from AI can be ported to be quantum-aware, and run on quantum computing hardware. But it’s a bit of a wild west at the moment. We don’t really have a good sense yet which of these ported machine learning methods are best suited to quantum computing, especially with today’s noisy and imperfect quantum hardware devices,” he added.
Xanadu has been developing an open-source software platform for QML, known as PennyLane over the past two years. PennyLane allows users to connect quantum computing hardware and software from multiple vendors—Xanadu, IBM, Google, Rigetti, and Microsoft—with popular machine learning libraries like TensorFlow and PyTorch.
This integration will enable Xanadu researchers to systematically explore the performance of a variety of near-term QML algorithms on multiple hardware devices.