How To Build Your Own Quantum ComputerA group of physicists are developing a quantum computer that's entirely open source, from hardware to software By Sophia Chen N o one in industry nor academia has yet managed to demonstrate a commercially useful quantum computing application.Nonetheless, public and private entities continue to invest billions of dollars into developing quantum applications with hopes of major returns.Some analysts project that the technology could generate $1 trillion by 2035.Amid this speculation, a group of physicists believe that they can cut through the hype with an open-source quantum computer.Roger Melko, Crystal Senko, and Rajibul Islam of the University of Waterloo in Canada teamed up with Greg Dick, formerly an executive at Perimeter Institute, also in Canada, to found a nonprofit called Open Quantum Design (OQD) in 2024.The company consists of quantum developers from academia and industry who pay a membership fee to participate in project-specific working groups.Other funding comes from the Canadian government and philanthropic organizations.
How To Build Your Own Quantum ComputerA group of physicists are developing a quantum computer that's entirely open source, from hardware to software By Sophia Chen N o one in industry nor academia has yet managed to demonstrate a commercially useful quantum computing application.Nonetheless, public and private entities continue to invest billions of dollars into developing quantum applications with hopes of major returns.Some analysts project that the technology could generate $1 trillion by 2035.Amid this speculation, a group of physicists believe that they can cut through the hype with an open-source quantum computer.Roger Melko, Crystal Senko, and Rajibul Islam of the University of Waterloo in Canada teamed up with Greg Dick, formerly an executive at Perimeter Institute, also in Canada, to found a nonprofit called Open Quantum Design (OQD) in 2024.The company consists of quantum developers from academia and industry who pay a membership fee to participate in project-specific working groups.Other funding comes from the Canadian government and philanthropic organizations.
Open source software is becoming crucial in the design and testing of quantum algorithms. Many of the tools are backed by major commercial vendors with the goal to make it easier to develop quantum software: this mirrors how well-funded open machine learning frameworks enabled the development of complex models and their execution on equally complex hardware. We review a wide range of open source software for quantum computing, covering all stages of the quantum toolchain from quantum hardware interfaces through quantum compilers to implementations of quantum algorithms, as well as all quantum computing paradigms, including quantum annealing, and discrete and continuous-variable gate-model quantum computing. The evaluation of each project covers characteristics such as documentation, licence, the choice of programming language, compliance with norms of software engineering, and the culture of the project. We find that while the diversity of projects is mesmerizing, only a few attract external developers and even many commercially backed frameworks have shortcomings in software engineering. Based on these observations, we highlight the best practices that could foster a more active community around quantum computing software that welcomes newcomers to the field, but also ensures high-quality, well-documented code.
Quantum technologies, such as communication, computing, and sensing, offer vast opportunities for advanced research and development. While an open-source ethos currently exists within some quantum technologies, especially in quantum computer programming, we argue that there are additional advantages in developing open quantum hardware (OQH). Open quantum hardware encompasses open-source software for the control of quantum devices in labs, blueprints, and open-source toolkits for chip design and other hardware components, as well as openly accessible testbeds and facilities that allow cloud-access to a wider scientific community. We provide an overview of current projects in the OQH ecosystem, identify gaps, and make recommendations on how to close them at present. More open quantum hardware would accelerate technology transfer to and growth of the quantum industry and increase accessibility in science.
Open-source projects that aim to make their offerings public have competed against for-profit, proprietary companies in a number of domains. These open-source projects often arise in response to the offerings of proprietary companies in markets where products have already been commercialized. We assess what impact an open-source project might have when it enters the market for quantum computing - a market where the core technology is still being developed. We argue that an open-source quantum computer might alleviate market frictions that have impeded the development of a fault-tolerant quantum computer by providing the market with a possible mechanism for: 1.) benchmarking, 2.) the development of hardware agnostic technology, and 3.) improved liquidity on the supply side of the market for labor. Should these outcomes be realized, they may not only benefit the open-source project, but also the for-profit, proprietary companies operating in the ecosystem. In this respect, an open-source quantum project may play a more complementary role to the proprietary firms in the ecosystem, rather than a more competitive role. Our collective insights may have implications for other settings where an open-source project enters into a market where the core technology has yet to be commercialized.
Since the late 2010s, quantum computers have become commercially available, and the number of services that users can run remotely via cloud servers is increasing. In Japan, several domestic superconducting quantum computing systems, including our own, began operation in 2023. However, the design of quantum computing systems, especially in the most critical areas near quantum computers, remains largely undisclosed, creating a significant barrier to entry into the quantum computing field. If this situation continues, progress toward standardization, which is essential for guiding quantum computer development, will stall, and it will be difficult to develop a practical quantum computing system that can perform calculations on a supercomputer scale. To address this issue, we propose Open Quantum Toolchain for OPerators and USers (OQTOPUS), a full-stack quantum computing system developed from research with real quantum computers. OQTOPUS is one of the world's largest open-source software projects, covering operational software from cloud-based execution environment construction to system operation. Furthermore, to perform quantum computing effectively and efficiently, it implements key features, such as transpilers, multi-programming, and error mitigation, in an area as close as possible to a quantum computer, an area that system vendors rarely disclose. Finally, this study presents experimental results of applying OQTOPUS to a real quantum computer. OQTOPUS is publicly available on GitHub and will notably lower the barrier to entry into the quantum computing field, contributing to the formation of a quantum computing developer community through open discussion.
Quantum computing is moving from research laboratories towards early commercialization and broader socio-technical adoption, supported by sustained hardware progress and a rapidly expanding open-source software ecosystem. This momentum is especially visible on GitHub, where many quantum and hybrid software projects coexist around frameworks such as Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane and Amazon Braket. However, this ecosystem remains fragmented, making it difficult to understand who shapes quantum software, where expertise is concentrated, how collaboration flows across organizations and disciplines, and which actors connect otherwise separated communities. This paper presents Entangle, a data-driven analysis of the open-source quantum computing ecosystem on GitHub. Starting from 71 domain keywords, Entangle identifies more than 1,500 quantum repositories, 27,000 contributors and 400 organizations, revealing an ecosystem strongly organized around four leading industrial vendors, but also supported by 2,387 contributors who connect projects, organizations and domains. These findings provide practical evidence for responsible quantum innovation by making visible patterns of influence, dependency, collaboration and knowledge transfer. They also offer actionable indicators for strategic decisions on investment, hiring, partnerships, ecosystem stewardship and capacity building. More broadly, Entangle shows how open-source intelligence can support a more transparent, measurable and governable quantum software ecosystem, helping align technical development with responsible innovation, public--private coordination and long-term sustainability.
The Intelligence Community, DOD, financial, and commercial entities rely on encryption to protect its most sensitive information. Public Key Encryption (PKE) method is used to encrypt information using the principle that it is difficult to factor a very large number into its primes unless one has access to a private key that was used to encrypt the information. Using this technology, decrypting a message using a 128-bit long key would take a classical supercomputer about 1 billion billion years to decrypt. However, in the mid-1990s, mathematicians Shor and Grover developed algorithms that have proved to be efficient in factoring large numbers into primes using a quantum computer. The development of quantum hardware and algorithms therefore threaten encryption protection. In 2019, Google announced that it established quantum supremacy, meaning that its quantum computer solved a problem that no classical computer could. The authors of this paper conducted a study to describe the latest encryption research and development, methods used, and the potential vulnerability due to quantum computing. The authors further established the timeframes in which pre-quantum encryption method will become vulnerable under three scenarios. All the research for this study was derived from unclassified open source materials.