Introducing the Qiskit Functions Catalog

Last year, researchers began exploring problems that are difficult to simulate with brute-force classical methods, thanks to utility-scale quantum computers available on IBM Quantum™ Platform. However, those experiments required a deep understanding of not just the quantum processing unit (QPU), but also the various error suppression and mitigation methods required to scale each individual problem.

Now, as we embark on a mission to make utility more accessible, we have launched a platform called the Qiskit Functions Catalog. With the Qiskit Functions Catalog, developers can release Qiskit Functions that unlock those capabilities for enterprise developers and quantum computational scientists.

We hope that Qiskit Functions will greatly accelerate the algorithm and application development process for our quantum computational scientists, while making it easier than ever for our enterprise developers to experiment with how quantum computing might accelerate use cases in their specific domain areas. We hope that the Qiskit Functions Catalog will become a go-to place for developers to offer tools that extend utility-scale quantum computing for the ever-growing quantum community.

Building a catalog to accelerate utility-scale research

The Qiskit Functions Catalog lets Premium Plan users explore the available functions, including those written by IBM® and those written by other members of our ecosystem. The catalog contains two kinds of functions: circuit functions and application functions.

• Circuit functions provide a simplified interface for running circuits. They receive user-provided abstract circuits and observables as input, then manage synthesis, optimization, and execution of the representative ISA circuit. Circuit functions bring together the latest capabilities in transpilation, error suppression, and error mitigation to make utility-grade performance accessible out of the box. This allows computational scientists to focus on mapping their problems to circuits, rather than building the pattern for each problem from scratch.

• Application functions cover higher-level tasks, like exploring algorithms and domain-specific use cases. Enterprise developers and data scientists might not have the background quantum information science knowledge for working with circuits, and instead hope to bring their domain knowledge to advance quantum computing algorithms and applications. With application functions, users can enter their classical inputs and receive solutions so they can more easily experiment with plugging quantum into their domain-specific workflows.

With the launch of the Qiskit Functions Catalog, Premium Plan developers can start exploring the IBM Circuit function. The IBM Circuit function includes the latest AI-powered extensions to Qiskit for circuit synthesis, optimization, and scheduling, as well as advanced error mitigation methods to return the most accurate estimations possible with today's hardware.

Users can purchase licenses for the following functions contributed by our partners at Q-CTRL, QEDMA, Algorithmiq, and Qunasys.

Circuit functions

• Q-CTRL is releasing a circuit function that applies AI-driven quantum control techniques, with which users can scale successfully to larger problems.

• Algorithmiq is releasing a circuit function that applies TEM (tensor-network error mitigation), an error mitigation method for obtaining estimators with fewer shots than the PEC (probabilistic error cancellation) method.

• QEDMA is releasing a circuit function that uses proprietary protocols for efficient and accurate characterization of the noisy QPU operations, and applies error suppression and error mitigation based on the characterization data.

Application functions

• QunaSys is releasing a chemistry application function comprising three algorithms meant to solve the ground state energy estimation (GSEE) problem.

• Q-CTRL is also releasing an optimization solver with which users can pass a graph or an objective, and receive solution costs.

Laying the groundwork for a quantum applications ecosystem

We hope that the Qiskit Functions Catalog will help researchers accelerate their utility-scale algorithm and application discovery, and will become the go-to platform for new developers building high-performance algorithms and applications in the future.

To get started, explore the Qiskit Functions documentation.