Constellation is available via Quantum Elements and runs on AWS, says Izhar Medalsy, co-founder and CEO at Quantum Elements. And it is designed to help quantum researchers develop and test error correction strategies.
Alternatives, such as the popular Stim simulator from Google Quantum AI, don’t simulate all the potential sources of errors, says Medalsy. “Stim uses a lot of approximations, which makes it very fast,” adds Tong Shen, research scientist at Quantum Elements, who worked on Constellation. “It’s low latency. But it’s just inaccurate.”
“Imagine you’re a captain of a boat, and you want to train your team to get from point A to point B,” Medalsy says. If the training simulator doesn’t account for ocean currents or wind conditions, the team won’t be able to navigate once they hit the real world.
Currently, he says, Constellation has modeled computers of up to 97 qubits, and it can be used to go even higher.
“We know how to make qubits work,” he says. “Now we see it as the engineering task to increase the number of qubits and reduce the noise.”
And with a digital twin, researchers can experiment with error-correction techniques even before the physical computers are ready. “You can solve the problem so once the hardware is ready, you plug it in, and you’re good to go,” he says.
