PennyLane-Qiskit Plugin

Release

0.30.0-dev

The PennyLane-Qiskit plugin integrates the Qiskit quantum computing framework with PennyLane’s quantum machine learning capabilities.

PennyLane is a cross-platform Python library for quantum machine learning, automatic differentiation, and optimization of hybrid quantum-classical computations.

Qiskit is an open-source framework for quantum computing.

Once the PennyLane-Qiskit plugin is installed, the the Qiskit devices can be accessed straightaway in PennyLane, without the need to import new packages.

Devices

Currently, there are three different devices available:

'qiskit.aer'

Qiskit's staple simulator with great features such as noise models.

'qiskit.basicaer'

A simplified version of the Aer device, which requires fewer dependencies.

'qiskit.ibmq'

Allows integration with qiskit's hardware backends, and hardware-specific simulators.

'qiskit.ibmq.circuit_runner'

Allows integration with qiskit's circuit runner runtime program.

'qiskit.ibmq.sampler'

Allows integration with qiskit's sampler runtime program.

For example, the 'qiskit.aer' device with two wires is called like this:

import pennylane as qml
dev = qml.device('qiskit.aer', wires=2)

Backends

Qiskit devices have different backends, which define which actual simulator or hardware is used by the device. Different simulator backends are optimized for different types of circuits. A backend can be defined as follows:

dev = qml.device('qiskit.aer', wires=2, backend='unitary_simulator')

PennyLane chooses the qasm_simulator as the default backend if no backend is specified. For more details on the qasm_simulator, including available backend options, see Qiskit Qasm Simulator documentation.

Tutorials

Check out these demos to see the PennyLane-Qiskit plugin in action:

Ensemble classification with Forest and Qiskit devices

Quantum volume

You can also try it out using any of the qubit based demos from the PennyLane documentation, for example the tutorial on qubit rotation. Simply replace 'default.qubit' with any of the available Qiskit devices, such as 'qiskit.aer', or 'qiskit.ibmq' if you have an API key for hardware access.

index

 

Download Python script

 

Download Notebook

 

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