A brief review of the QRISP Community Kick Off
Date: September 10, 2024 – September 12, 2024
Quantum computers are associated with the hope of achieving enormous leaps in computing power. To support developers in programming quantum computers, Fraunhofer FOKUS founded the Thinq Qrisp Community on September 10. The event brought together around 45 participants from industry and research.
In addition to networking opportunities, participants with basic or advanced quantum knowledge were able to take part in workshops.
These were entitled:
- “Quantum Computing – From problem description to implementation” and
- “Advanced: Bring your own adder: Implementing a quantum multiplier with an arbitrary addition function”.
Workshop 1
Bring your own adder: Implementing a quantum multiplier with an arbitrary addition function (Advanced Workshop)
In this session the participants learned about many of the Qrisp programming primitives such as effective memory management, hardware specific compilation or algorithm modularization in a simple hands-on example. Starting from a Jupyter notebook with some initial information Raphael showed the participants how to implement a quantum multiplier using a limited pool of primitives. This multiplier was constructed such that at the end of the session the participants could even plug in their own adder.
Workshop 2
From problem description to implementation
(Basic Session)
In this session, participants were able to explore the steps required to identify problems that could potentially be solved with a quantum computer. To make this more tangible, Sebastian guided the participants through a realistic scenario based on a train timetable problem. This enabled the participants and him to develop an initial basic Qrisp implementation. The basic steps of the scenario included modeling the problem, which in this case was done using a graphical representation. This included identifying the relevant mathematical problem—the coloring of graphs for the creation of train timetables. It also included solving this problem, which was done here using the Qrisp implementation of the quantum backtracking algorithm.
Goal of the Thinq Qrisp community
Working on new ideas for programming quantum computers is the goal of the Thinq Qrisp community. One goal is to consolidate the activities of the quantum software engineering community and connect the individual players with each other. The activities focus on the Qrisp programming language developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS. This is intended to enable the commercial application of quantum computers for a broad audience of developers. As an open source project, Qrisp enables all users to learn, share and further develop the software together, creating a committed and growing community.
The event ended with an outlook on the next steps of the community and the opportunity to provide feedback (a feature of the community, which aims to integrate its members frequently).
We received positive feedback from the participants, which shows that interesting ideas were conveyed and initial interest was fuelled. The keynotes and interactive workshops were perceived most positively. It was also possible to identify which activities should take place in the future. The main requests were for webinars and techtalks and introductions to QRISP and tutorials.
We would like to thank everyone for their participation and interesting discussions and are already looking forward to further online and in-person events.