Software Engineering for Quantum Softwares

Development of new software engineering methods, tools and platforms is crucial to achieving elusive quantum advantage for practical applications. Existing quantum software packages and programming environments are primarily developed by commercial entities such as IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc., which are tailored to meet the needs of their specific hardware. Furthermore, an application developer receives limited software engineering support in terms of co-design with traditional compute infrastructure and applications, security, hardware-agnostic abstractions and analysis. Leveraging our existing strength in software engineering, Data61 will develop state-of-the-art quantum software engineering methods/tools/platforms to tackle these challenges. The primary aim is lower the barrier for quantum application developers by allowing them to co-design and co-develop quantum applications in a high-level abstraction next to traditional compute and software. The software platform will offer high-level architecture/design methods and APIs for decoupling quantum algorithms from the underlying heterogeneous quantum platforms and will coordinate a rich repository of ready-to-use industry-driven quantum algorithm libraries. The established quantum software engineering environment will play an important role in accelerating progress toward end-user applications. The in-house development of the quantum software engineering environment will be an Australian national sovereign capability, providing Australian industry, defence, and other sectors full control over the software-level security while working with the third-party quantum hardware platforms.