Today Zapata Computing announced an Early Access Program to Orquestra, its end-to-end platform for quantum-enabled workflows. Providing the most software- and hardware-interoperable, enterprise quantum toolset, Orquestra enables advanced technology, R&D and academic teams to accelerate quantum solutions for complex computational problems in optimization, machine learning and simulation across a variety of industries. With extensive support and guidance from Zapata experts, Orquestra will allow teams to accelerate their work in quantum.
I am thrilled Zapata is the first to market with a unified Quantum Operating Environment where users can build, run and analyze quantum and quantum-inspired workflows. This toolset will empower enterprises and institutions to make their quantum mark on the world, enabling them to develop quantum capabilities and foundational IP today while shoring up for derivative IP for tomorrow,” says CEO Christopher Savoie. “It is a new computing paradigm, built on a unified enterprise framework that spans quantum and classical programming and hardware tools. With Orquestra, we are accelerating quantum experiments at scale.”
Orquestra is agnostic across the entire software and hardware stack. It offers the most extensible library of open source and Zapata-created components for writing, manipulating and optimizing quantum circuits and running them across quantum computers, quantum simulators and classical computing resources. It comes equipped with a versatile workflow system and APIs to connect all modes of quantum devices. Specifically, Orquestra avails:
- Extensive Access to Quantum Libraries for Seamlessly Composing Workflows: With the most robust capabilities for quantum workflow design, execution and analysis, Orquestra users can begin with example workflows, open source algorithms, and a growing range of proprietary Zapata algorithms. In addition, Orquestra allows users to build their own algorithms and IP. They can mix and match modules written with popular quantum libraries and languages of their choice, including Cirq, Qiskit, PennyLane and PyQuil, leveraging a growing library of backends with no limits on software or device technologies.
- Deployment Across NISQ, Quantum-Inspired and Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Classical Backends: Users can submit workflows to the Orquestra Quantum Engine (OQE) servers with command line tools and orchestrate workflow tasks across a full range of backends that include gate model devices (such as ion traps and superconducting), quantum annealers, quantum simulators and HPC resources. In the future, more emerging quantum systems such as photonic-based, silicon-based and neutral atom systems can be connected. Users can leverage OQE servers and run work on their cloud of choice, Zapata’s cloud or on-premise, connecting across networks to quantum devices and simulators.
- Moving Beyond Hardware-Agnostic into Hardware-Smart Development: Orquestra is the only quantum platform that goes beyond hardware-agnostic capabilities, allowing users to consider various devices’ strengths for particular problems and benchmark how workflows perform across devices. More than that, they can accelerate their quantum experiments by using Zapata’s proprietary algorithms for quantum hardware resource optimization. However, Orquestra’s level of abstraction is flexible so that non-quantum domain experts on a development team do not need to understand quantum device physics to be productive from day one.
- Scalable Orchestration: From managing complex data records to automated parallelization through container orchestration, quantum teams benefit from iterative, flexible experiments at scale.
- Multi-User Data Management and Interpretability: Quantum teams can swiftly record and compare results, then review and iterate as a multi-user team, incorporating benchmarking across quantum hardware and algorithms. Both intermediate data and final results can be exported into a Jupyter Notebook, Excel or Tableau for analysis.
We developed Orquestra to scale our own work for our customers, and then realized the quantum community needs it, too. Orquestra is the only system for managing quantum workflows. By providing frictionless collaboration and rapid iteration, it helps Zapata and our entire community accelerate the discovery and development of near-term quantum algorithms and applications,” adds CTO Yudong Cao. “The way we design and deploy computing solutions is changing. Orquestra’s interoperable nature enables extensible and modular implementations of algorithms and workflows across platforms, and unlocks fast, fluid repeatability of experiments at scale.”
Coming on the heels of an investment and strategic partnership with Honeywell to leverage the organization’s powerful trapped-ion quantum devices, Zapata is at the forefront of quantum software innovation. Other recent achievements reflect Zapata’s ability to create tools that extract maximum performance from the latest quantum devices. One example is the recent research result of an application benchmark that “test-drives” Google’s Sycamore chip, which was used in the Quantum Supremacy experiment. This is the first hardware benchmark proposal with a focus on particular applications, leading to the concept of “fermionic length,” which can be used to gauge quantum device usefulness when simulating quantum physics. Another example is a collaboration with IBM to run Variational Quantum Factoring (VQF) algorithms, executing the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on IBM’s quantum hardware backends. The collaboration has successfully demonstrated seamless integration of classical and quantum components into workflows deployed on the cloud. Both examples illustrate how Zapata combines deep scientific expertise on quantum algorithms and hardware with revolutionary software tools.
Zapata’s Early Access Program to Orquestra is aimed at users with backgrounds in software engineering, machine learning, physics, computational chemistry or quantum information theory working on the most computationally complex problems. The Early Access Program provides access to Orquestra’s most expansive quantum toolset, dedicated support time with Zapata experts and joint projects to deepen teams’ quantum capabilities, especially in finance, chemistry, materials discovery, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, aerospace and automotive, telecommunications, and transportation and logistics. More than 50 initial enterprise users are signed up for hands-on programming workshops starting this month.
