Quantum Computing Software

Available Software Modules

Pawsey supports several different quantum computing frameworks, aiming for significant coverage of CUDA-enabled software.

Qiskit is an open-source quantum SDK developed by IBM. It provides tools for building quantum circuits, running simulations, and can also be used to execute circuits on real quantum hardware. On Setonix-Q, Qiskit is available with Qiskit Aer, which provides several simulation methods:

• statevector — full wavefunction simulation (GPU supported)

• density_matrix — density matrix simulation for noise modelling (GPU supported)

• unitary — unitary matrix simulation of the circuit (GPU supported)

• tensor_network — tensor network simulation (GPU only, via cuTensorNet)

• matrix_product_state — MPS-based simulation for circuits with limited entanglement (CPU only)

• stabilizer — efficient simulation of Clifford circuits (CPU only)

• extended_stabilizer — approximate simulation for Clifford+T circuits (CPU only)

• superop — superoperator matrix simulation (CPU only)

GPU acceleration is enabled by setting device="GPU" when creating the AerSimulator.

PennyLane is an open-source quantum programming framework developed by Xanadu. It is designed for differentiable programming of quantum computers, making it suitable for hybrid quantum-classical workflows, variational quantum algorithms, and quantum machine learning applications. PennyLane provides several simulation backends:

• lightning.qubit — statevector simulation with OpenMP parallelisation (CPU)

• lightning.gpu — statevector simulation with GPU acceleration via cuStateVec

• lightning.tensor — tensor network simulation with GPU acceleration via cuTensorNet

PennyLane-Qiskit is a plugin that allows PennyLane users to access Qiskit Aer backends. This is useful for combining PennyLane's programming model with Qiskit Aer's GPU-accelerated simulation capabilities.

cuQuantum is an NVIDIA SDK for GPU-accelerated quantum circuit simulation. It includes two main libraries:

• cuStateVec — accelerates statevector simulation by performing gate operations directly on GPU memory

• cuTensorNet — accelerates tensor network methods by optimising tensor contraction pathways on the GPU

cuTensor is a separate NVIDIA library for tensor algebra operations, used as a dependency by cuTensorNet.

These libraries are loaded as dependencies and used internally by Qiskit Aer and PennyLane Lightning backends — you typically do not interact with them directly.

Software requests

As setonix-q quantum is new, there is a possibility for new software to be added to the supported software stack. Please email the helpdesk, mentioning setonix-q and software in the ticket. New software will be added based on feasibility and demand.