The open source code for OpenFermion, which Google says is free to use, allows chemists and materials scientists to adapt algorithms and equations to run on quantum computers using Google software.

Access:

Github.com/rigetticomp…

“We hope that this decision will help build the OpenFermion standard community so that chemical simulations can be performed on quantum computers.” “Google wrote in a blog post.

Google’s open-source approach is also the current trend in quantum computing. Companies such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft and D-Wave have all announced the opening of their quantum computing platforms to facilitate the commercial operation of quantum computing.

Specifically, OpenFermion includes a library of algorithms that simulate electron interactions on a quantum computer. This is important for chemistry and materials science because OpenFermion can help scientists describe chemical molecular simulations and materials in ways that quantum computers can be programmed to understand. Previously, chemists had to work with professional quantum computer software developers to write large amounts of software code to simulate the interactions between electrons on a quantum computer.

In addition, OpenFermion can directly adapt two of the most popular traditional emulators — Psi4 and PySCF. It’s also worth noting that OpenFermion is compatible with several different quantum computers, including those developed by Google, Rigetti and IBM.

In addition to Google, quantum computer start-up Rigetti is also involved in the software development. The software was developed with help from ETH Zurich, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Oxford University, Dartmouth College and NASA, Google said in the blog post.

The biggest difference between a quantum computer and a conventional computer is that it can solve multiple problems simultaneously, whereas a conventional computer can only solve them one by one in chronological order.

Traditional computers use binary arithmetic, with zeros and ones to record the state of information. However, quantum computer describes information by quantum state. According to the characteristics of quantum, it can express multiple states at the same time and perform superposition operation at the same time, so it has a faster operation mode.

Since quantum computers have several orders of magnitude more processing power than today’s conventional supercomputers. As a result, many believe quantum computers will perform tasks previously thought impossible, such as simulating chemical catalysts, building models of super-complex systems, and cracking encryption codes. But so far, the quantum computers these companies have developed aren’t powerful enough or precise enough to outperform traditional computers for most tasks.

Google has long been considered a leader in quantum computing. Google has already produced a 9-qubit machine and plans to increase it to 49 qubits this year to achieve quantum hegemony. IBM also has big ambitions to advance commercial quantum computing. In March this year, IBM announced that it would launch the world’s first commercial quantum computing cloud service: IBM Q. It is also the world’s first charging quantum computing cloud service system. At the time, IBM said the new system would serve researchers around the world and be key to nurturing the quantum computing market in the future by handling complex calculations that traditional computers cannot solve.