IonQ, the trapped ion quantum computing company that recently went public via a SPAC, today announced that it is integrating its quantum computing platform with the open-source Qiskit software development kit. This means Qiskit users can now bring their programs to IonQ’s platform without any major modifications to their code.
At first glance, that seems relatively unremarkable, but it’s worth noting that Qiskit was founded by IBM Research and is IBM’s default tool for working with its quantum computers. There is a healthy bit of competition between IBM and IonQ (and, to be fair, many others in this space), in part because both are betting on very different technologies at the core of their platforms. While IonQ is betting on trapped ions, which allows its machines able to run at room temperature, IBM’s technique requires its machine to be supercooled.
IonQ has now released a new provider library for Qiskit that is available as part of the Qiskit Partner repository on GitHub and via the Python Package Index.
“IonQ is excited to make our quantum computers and APIs easily accessible to the Qiskit community,” said IonQ CEO & President Peter Chapman. “Open source has already revolutionized traditional software development. With this integration, we’re bringing the world one step closer to the first generation of widely-applicable quantum applications.”
On the one hand, it’s hard not to look at this as IonQ needling IBM a bit, but it’s also an acknowledgment that Qiskit has become somewhat of a standard for developers who want to work with quantum computers. But putting these rivalries aside, we’re also in the early days of quantum computing and with no clear leader yet, anything that makes these various platforms more interoperable is a win for developers who want to dip their feet into writing for them.
