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11.4.2025
Veena Vijayakumar

2025 Q1 Updates: UCC Launch, UnitaryHACK, upcoming workshops, and more

Dear Unitary Foundation community,

We are excited to share our 2025 Q1 quarterly update!

Earlier this year, we introduced the Unitary Compiler Collection (UCC) to foster collaboration and streamline quantum compilation. By working with the quantum open source ecosystem, we are excited to build a new tool designed to help the most people: integrating performant and user-friendly tools into UCC, and creating a platform-agnostic interface with competitive compile time and gate reduction efficiency. Introduced in its foundational stages, we are committed to building UCC public and inviting the quantum open source community to shape its development with us. Learn more about UCC and how you can start to contribute today here.

Last month, we announced the 5th edition of unitaryHACK, our annual bug-bounty style hackathon! Last year, 873 participants joined us and 68 hackers won bounties that spanned 49 projects. In this milestone year we aim to be bigger and better than ever, including an expansion of our Hackday Program, where students can meet in person on their campus for a day to team up and close bounties together. Currently, we’re working with partners to set up sites in Seattle, Germany, Finland, Mexico, Portugal, and more. Keep an eye out for specific venues and dates to be announced soon! To learn more about unitaryHACK, Hackdays, and the myriad ways to participate, check out our website and blogpost.

This summer we’ll also be hosting WERQSHOP, an NSF-funded workshop bringing together researchers, developers, and practitioners to advance error resilience in quantum computing. WERQSHOP will be held in New York City on July 17-18, with more information about confirmed speakers, topics, and venue to come soon. Learn more and register now on the WERQSHOP website to stay in the loop.

Looking forward to seeing you all at these upcoming events and more!

New from Unitary Foundation

UCC

We’ve officially launched the Unitary Compiler Collection (UCC)!! The UCC team is currently hosting sessions where we share a private demo of UCC’s capabilities with members of the quantum compiler community, share our design philosophy and roadmap, and ask for their feedback. A few ways our community can contribute right now: (1) creating custom compiler passes, (2) reporting bugs and requesting features, (3) contributing code and (4) joining the discussion. We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Mitiq

The Mitiq project continues to see steady growth. You can read more about about new release highlights on the Mitiq github page:

  • In v.0.43.0: This release marks the first step toward Virtual Distillation (VD) in Mitiq, with an initial helper function that vertically copies a circuit M times. A team of students at the University of Amsterdam worked for the month of January on implementing the technique that will be integrated into Mitiq over the coming releases. We also have a new tutorial (thanks to our colleague Purva Thakre) on combining Pauli Twirling and Zero-Noise Extrapolation!
  • In v.0.44.0: This release introduces the first version of the Virtual Distillation (VD) technique in Mitiq, which is now available for use! This technique was prototyped and implemented by a team of students at the University of Amsterdam. VD uses additional qubits to distill a purer version of the quantum state of interest. The implementation is in its early stages so lacks support for all QPROGRAM types. Currently only programs written in cirq are supported. We welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Metriq

  • Metriq.info received a UI refresh where the team simplified its design and presentation to bring the most relevant information right to the forefront of the user experience!
  • Metriq-Gym: We have a public working prototype of a command-line tool to define, collect, review, and publish quantum hardware benchmarks directly to the Metriq web app. More news about Metriq-Gym and opportunities to collaborate will continue to be shared with the public over the upcoming months, but you can learn more on our Github page for now.

Qlass

The repository for the software tool to compile Lithium ion battery problems into photonics chips is open source at https://github.com/unitaryfoundation/qlass. We hope you’ll take a look!

Conferences + Events We Attended in Q1

  • University of Amsterdam Mitiq RFC project | Jan 8
  • FOSDEM 2025 Quantum Computing Devroom in Bruxelles | Feb 2 [Blogpost here]
  • QuSoft Seminar | Feb 7 [Link to presentation deck here]
  • APS Global Physics Summit 2025 | Mar 18 [Talk info here]

Q1 Grants

  • To Fenton Clawson to further develop FLiMESolve (short for Floquet-Lindblad Master Equation Solver), which is a tool for use in solving open quantum systems that fall under the regime of Floquet theory - namely those systems with periodic Hamiltonians.
  • To Katherine Van Kirk, Christian Kokail, Jonathan Kunjummen, Hong-Ye Hu, and Yanting Teng to develop an intuitive, open-source python package for the derandomized shallow shadows (DSS) algorithm using tensor network techniques to ensure efficient runtimes and enable experimentalists to quickly identify low-depth circuits for Pauli learning.
  • To Le Vu Trung Duong, Vu Tuan Hai, and Pham Hoai Luan for QIMAX: A Quantum Emulator on FPGA for High Power Efficiency. The team aims to create an emulator that outperforms CPUs, GPUs, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) emulators in speed and energy efficiency, offering a valuable tool for researchers.
  • To Alejandro Montanez Barrera to further develop and test LR-QAOA quantum benchmarking, which is a scalable volumetric benchmarking tool that allows the comparison of quantum process units (QPU) with different topologies.
  • To Konstantin Golovkin and Oxana Shaya to further develop and extend their project, PauLie.
  • To Sohum Thakkar to develop Qubi, an interactive device that the team hopes will be used by quantum enthusiasts as a teaching tool and by quantum newbies looking to learn quantum in an intuitive way.
  • To Gennadi Ryan for Python Piccolo, an open-source Python package wrapping the Piccolo.jl library, integrated with the popular QuTIP package for simulation of quantum systems.

Other News from the Community

  • Micrograntees Amber Van Hauwermeiren and Adriaan Rol and their team at OrangeQS have been very busy with their project. During a closed beta test phase during March Meeting, they revealed OrangeQS Juice, their new operating system for quantum systems. The team is currently running more closed beta test phases with the Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) at Berkeley Lab, Chalmers Next Labs, and QuTech. The system will be made open source and shared with the public later this year. You can read more here. The team also released a new version of their Quantify framework, which is now compatible with Zurich Instruments and LabOneQ hardware. And finally, the team put out a new paper called Optimizing the frequency positioning of tunable couplers in a circuit QED processor to mitigate spectator effects on quantum operations.
  • Micrograntee Piotr Migdal translated their project (now a new nonprofit!), Quantum Flytrap, into several languages. Piotr hopes this will make quantum physics more accessible worldwide and will give lecturers, teachers, and educators the opportunity to conduct classes in their native languages. Read about Piotr’s on the process here.
  • From UF Community member Tyson Jones: QuEST v4 has been released! It has an overhauled API, a new software architecture, a greatly accelerated backend and a variety of new functions - including an auto-deployer to automatically distribute quantum registers in heterogeneous and multi-GPU settings. C-language-family distributed full-state simulators have never been sexier! See the repo, or check out the new work here.

Coming up