Quantum computers are not just science fiction anymore, with many companies building increasingly more powerful quantum computers. While, concepts in quantum computing have been around for over 30 years, it hasn’t been generally accessible until recently. Despite this quantum computing is still very much in its infancy and there are physical limitations preventing them from being generally usable. But the machines that are available today are useful for experimentation and showcasing certain applications where they will be useful in the future.

Open source software for quantum computing has started being developed as these new machines are being built. Learning the lessons from the history of developing classical computers, there are already several open source SDKs, languages, and libraries being developed for quantum computers despite the current limitations of quantum computers. This means as the technology matures and becomes more practical there will already be an open source ecosystem for using quantum computing.

This talk will provide an introduction to the basics of quantum information theory, look at some of the quantum computers out there, explore the open source tooling available for quantum computing, and show how you can use that to write your own quantum programs and run them on simulators and actual quantum computers.

Speaker

Matthew Treinish has been working on and contributing to Open Source software for most of his career. Matthew currently works for IBM Research developing open source software for quantum computing. He is also a long time OpenStack contributor and a former member of the OpenStack TC (Technical Committee) and was previously the PTL (project technical lead) of the OpenStack community’s QA program. He has previously been a speaker at linux.conf.au, OpenStack summits, LinuxCons Japan, China, and North America, Open Source Summit Europe, SeaGL, OpenWest, and FOSSASIA.

16th Anniversary

This will also be the 16th Anniversay meeting, as such, there will be cake.

Lightning Talks

We’ll also be doing the following lightning talks before the meeting:

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