The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, has launched the country’s first ‘Quantum Computer Simulator (QSim) Toolkit’ on August 27, 2021. Quantum Computing is a rapidly emerging computational paradigm that can perform a variety of tasks with greater speed and efficiency than present-day digital computers by harnessing the power of Quantum Mechanics. In areas such as cryptography, computational chemistry, and machine learning, Quantum computing promises exponential growth in computing power. QSim is a first-of-its-kind toolkit to be indigenously developed and is intended to be a vital tool in learning and understanding the practical aspects of programming using Quantum Computers and thus herald a new era of Quantum Computing research in India.
Besides, the QSim toolkit is in alignment with Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision for transforming India into a self-reliant nation by 2022, which is part of the central government’s flagship program called Aatma Nirbhar Bharat. It is a proud moment for the entire QSim Toolkit team, who have worked relentlessly on the initiative to enable a toolkit for advancing Quantum Computing research in India.
It is the country’s first collaborative initiative in this field, brought together by IISc Bangalore, IIT Roorkee, and C-DAC to address the common challenge of advancing the Quantum Computing research frontiers in India. It will enable researchers and students to research Quantum Computing in a cost-effective manner.
Recognizing the institution’s achievement at a national scale, Prof. Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, said, “IIT Roorkee will continue to play an active role in quantum computing education and research. The quantum simulator being launched today is poised to be a key enabler in this direction.”
The project was conceptualized through a multi-institutional approach by IISc Bengaluru, IIT Roorkee, and C-DAC as participating agencies. It was supported & funded by MeitY. QSim allows researchers and students to write and debug Quantum Code that is essential for developing Quantum Algorithms. QSim equips researchers to explore Quantum Algorithms under idealized conditions and assists them in making necessary arrangements for experiments to run on actual Quantum Hardware. QSim can serve as an essential educational/research tool providing an excellent way to attract students/researchers to the field of Quantum Technology. The toolkit creates a platform that helps students and users acquire the skills of ‘programming’ and ‘designing’ real Quantum Hardware.
As part of the “Design and Development of Quantum Computing Toolkit (Simulator, Workbench) and Capacity Building” project, the team from IIT Roorkee helped the teams from the Indian Institute of Science, CDAC-Bangalore, CDAC-Hyderabad, in providing the required expertise in quantum computing and developing programs to be tested and implemented on the toolkit. One of the unique features of QSim is its Intuitive User Interface, which offers a robust Quantum Computer Simulator integrated with a Graphical User Interface-based Workbench to create Quantum programs and visualize the instant circuit generation simulated outputs.
