Baidu, the company behind the homonymous search engine, has announced its first quantum computing processor, named Qian Shi, along with an "all-platform" integration solution aimed to simplify access to quantum hardware resources via mobile, desktop, and the Cloud.
Qian Shi, which means "the origin of all things is found in the heavens" in Chinese, provides 10 high-fidelity qubits. While this might not be the most powerful quantum hardware available, Baidu says they have completed the design of a 36-qubit superconducting quantum chip with couplers.
Most interestingly, Qian Shi comes with a complete software stack, which Baidu dubs "all-platform quantum hardware-software integration solution", that provides a set of services for private deployment, cloud services, and hardware access. This solution, called Liang Xi, aims to be compatible with heterogeneous quantum hardware, including a 10-qubit superconducting quantum device and a trapped-ion quantum device developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. To complete the idea of "all platform", Baidu says Liang Xi can be used via mobile and desktop apps, as well as the Cloud.
With Qian Shi and Liang Xi, users can now create quantum algorithms and use quantum computing power without developing their quantum hardware, control systems, or programming languages.
Baidu's quantum software stack includes Quanlse, a cloud-based platform for quantum control, Paddle Quantum, a quantum machine learning platform, Quantum Leaf, a quantum computing platform, and others.
Quanlse supports the pulse generation and scheduling of arbitrary single-qubit and two-qubit gates. It can be used for modeling real superconducting quantum chips and for simulating noisy quantum devices. It also supports error analysis to help characterize and mitigate errors.
Quantum Leaf can be used for programming, simulating, and executing quantum computers. It provides the quantum programming environment for Quantum infrastructure as a Service (QaaS).
Paddle Quantum enables bridging Quantum Leaf with machine learning and can be used for a number of popular quantum machine learning topics, including combinatorial optimization, local operations and classical communication.
With the Qian Shi and Liang Xi announcement, Baidu is entering the arena of quantum solutions that researchers and companies can use to experiment with quantum algorithms. Other players in the same arena are IBM with its IBM Quantum, Microsoft with Azure Quantum, Google with Quantum AI, D-Wave, and others.