The choice of which framework software to use for our circuit-based approach was not a particularly hard one for us. We have our own experiment in the lab which implements a non-standard device for quantum simulation and thus some of our requirements are (roughly in order of importance):
  1. Can we integrate our own experimental hardware into the framework and potentially run it from there?
  2. How strong of an assumption is made about the computational unit of the hardware? Does it have to be strictly qubits/photons etc.?
  3. Is the framework open-source and shows openness to the academic community?
  4. Can also integrate classical simulators that are based on our hardware?
  5. Does it provide some sort of user management and safety measures to avoid unqualified users from killing the system?
Lets give a brief overview of how we answered those questions with regard to PennyLane. PennyLane is designed for users to write and use their own plugin, which is what they call the integration of quantum computing devices into the framework. Officially, it only supports qubit and continuous variable devices and not more general approaches but we may be able to integrate bosonic and fermionic atoms flexibly as the code itself is not very restricted. Other big platorms like QiskitForest and Strawberry Fields focus exclusively on their own quantum computing hardware or simulator without the possibility to integrate your own. PennyLane is open-source and Python-based, which is perfect as the Labscript Suite controlling our experiment is so, too. Additionally, the company behind PennyLane, Xanadu, is a partly academic player who is very open in their publications and supports a great community around the software. The framework allows to add simulators to the framework device which mirror the functionality of the hardware. It performs various parameter range checks for the system and the operations used. Not built-in is user a system for management which allows only registered users to run the experiment from a queue. We would have to implement this ourselves.
All-in-all, PennyLane seems to be the best and likely only fit for our endeavors. Let's talk about it in more detail.