IBM is releasing Qiskit SDK v1.2, introducing several important new features and improvements, all aimed at boosting the Qiskit SDK’s industry-leading performance and functionality.
Since transitioning to the v1.x era with the release of its first major version earlier this year, IBM has been laser-focused on making the Qiskit SDK the most powerful, high-performant quantum SDK in the world.
IBM’s goal is to ensure that researchers and developers can use Qiskit as a high-performance tool for efficiently running utility-scale workloads.
According to the company, the focus continues with the new v1.2 release, which brings significant enhancements to the performance and overall quality of the Qiskit transpiler.
It is important to note that v1.2 will be the last Qiskit SDK release that supports Python 3.8. Once Qiskit v1.3 arrives later this year, the minimum required Python version will be Python 3.9.
With the Qiskit SDK v1.2 release, all circuit infrastructure—e.g., gates, operations, etc.—has been “oxidized,” or moved to Rust, enabling speedups in circuit construction and manipulation.
Additionally, because of this change, much of the synthesis library now constructs circuits in Rust, producing significant speedups when synthesizing operations such as Cliffords, permutations, or linear functions, according to the company.
The quality of transpiled circuits has also been improved through the implementation of a unitary peephole optimization as well as a dense layout in Sabre trials.
The update also adds a new quality of life improvement when importing the generate_preset_pass_manager() function.
For more information about this news, visit www.ibm.com.