Unitary Fund held the first in-person workshop for the Mitiq project on August 17.

The workshop was part of the first Numerical Methods in Quantum Information Science (QIS) Summer School at the Mount Ida campus of University of Massachusetts Amherst. The program took place August 12-18, 2024, with a full day dedicated to Mitiq and quantum error mitigation.

Over 40 students attended the summer school, most at the graduate or postdoc level, with a few advanced undergraduates and other motivated community members. The program focused on practical, experiential learning with an emphasis on programming skills and open source tooling. This focus, combined with an openness in accepting applicants with various backgrounds and career stages, made it a natural fit for hosting the Mitiq workshop.

Topics covered in the days leading up to the Mitiq workshop included general software engineering practices and cluster computing tools, advanced general scientific programming, GPU programming, fast general purpose wavefunction simulation, tensor networks for faster approximate quantum simulations, stabilizer formalism for quantum error correction, discrete event simulations, quantum chemistry, symbolic computer algebra basics, optimal control of quantum hardware, APIs for control of commercial quantum hardware. After the full-day interactive sessions, the students participated in focused hackathons, applying concepts and skills covered in the program. Unitary Fund CTO Nathan Shammah also presented on the quantum open technology ecosystem and Unitary Fund’s activities to grow and support it. Unitary Fund Technical Staff Member Misty Wahl presented a survey of hybrid quantum error mitigation, including her recent work “Zero noise extrapolation on logical qubits by scaling the error correction code distance”.

Workshop topics

On the day of the workshop, we began by presenting quantum error mitigation (QEM) core concepts and techniques, Mitiq’s structure and interface, and a deep dive into the techniques of Zero Noise Extrapolation (ZNE) and Digital Dynamical Decoupling (DDD). We then challenged the students to complete a guided Jupyter notebook activity applying ZNE and DDD to standard benchmarking problems on simulated noisy backends. The workshop concluded in the evening with a pizza social and informal Mitiq coding session. Throughout the workshop the participants asked thoughtful questions and gave insightful feedback, which will we will use to inform future Mitiq development and outreach. We look forward to seeing the participants continue to engage with the open quantum tech community and spread the word about Mitiq.

Growing the Mitiq community

This workshop marked an important achievement for the growth of Mitiq, moving from virtual collaboration to an in-person focused session with new and existing users of the software. Mitiq is the open source quantum error mitigation compiler developed by the Unitary Fund technical team with a global community. To date, Mitiq has over 140k downloads on PyPI and over 70 contributors worldwide on Github. The Mitiq documentation and tutorials contains more information about error mitigation and supported techniques. Mitiq’s open source ecosystem growth is accelerated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) POSE program (Phase II) awarded to Unitary Fund.

Our thanks to the organizers Stefan Krastanov (U. Mass. Amherst), Katharine Hyatt (AWS Quantum) and Roger Luo (QuEra) for enthusiastically including us and producing an excellent program, and to the sponsors of the school.

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