How to connect Qibolab to your lab?#

In this section we will show how to let Qibolab communicate with your lab’s instruments and run an experiment.

The main required object, in this case, is the Platform. A Platform is defined as a QPU (quantum processing unit with one or more qubits) controlled by one ore more instruments.

How to define a platform for a self-hosted QPU?#

The qibolab.platform.Platform object holds all the information required to execute programs, and in particular qibolab.pulses.PulseSequence in a real QPU. It is comprised by different objects that contain information about the qubit characterization and connectivity, the native gates and the lab’s instrumentation.

The following cell shows how to define a single qubit platform from scratch, using different Qibolab primitives.

from qibolab import Platform
from qibolab.qubits import Qubit
from qibolab.pulses import PulseType
from qibolab.channels import ChannelMap, Channel
from qibolab.native import NativePulse, SingleQubitNatives
from qibolab.instruments.dummy import DummyInstrument


def create():
    # Create a controller instrument
    instrument = DummyInstrument("my_instrument", "0.0.0.0:0")

    # Create channel objects and assign to them the controller ports
    channels = ChannelMap()
    channels |= Channel("ch1out", port=instrument["o1"])
    channels |= Channel("ch2", port=instrument["o2"])
    channels |= Channel("ch1in", port=instrument["i1"])

    # create the qubit object
    qubit = Qubit(0)

    # assign native gates to the qubit
    qubit.native_gates = SingleQubitNatives(
        RX=NativePulse(
            name="RX",
            duration=40,
            amplitude=0.05,
            shape="Gaussian(5)",
            pulse_type=PulseType.DRIVE,
            qubit=qubit,
            frequency=int(4.5e9)
        ),
        MZ=NativePulse(
            name="MZ",
            duration=1000,
            amplitude=0.005,
            shape="Rectangular()",
            pulse_type=PulseType.READOUT,
            qubit=qubit,
            frequency=int(7e9)
        )
    )

    # assign channels to the qubit
    qubit.readout = channels["ch1out"]
    qubit.feedback = channels["ch1in"]
    qubit.drive = channels["ch2"]

    # create dictionaries of the different objects
    qubits = {qubit.name: qubit}
    pairs = {} # empty as for single qubit we have no qubit pairs
    instruments = {instrument.name: instrument}

    # allocate and return Platform object
    return Platform("my_platform", qubits, pairs, instruments, resonator_type="3D")

This code creates a platform with a single qubit that is controlled by the qibolab.instruments.dummy.DummyInstrument. In real applications, if Qibolab provides drivers for the instruments in the lab, these can be directly used in place of the DummyInstrument above, otherwise new drivers need to be coded following the abstract qibolab.instruments.abstract.Instrument interface.

Furthermore, above we defined three channels that connect the qubit to the control instrument and we assigned two native gates to the qubit. In this example we neglected or characterization parameters associated to the qubit. These can be passed when defining the qibolab.qubits.Qubit objects.

When the QPU contains more than one qubit, some of the qubits are connected so that two-qubit gates can be applied. For such connected pairs of qubits one needs to additionally define qibolab.qubits.QubitPair objects, which hold the parameters of the two-qubit gates.

from qibolab.qubits import Qubit, QubitPair
from qibolab.pulses import PulseType
from qibolab.native import (
    NativePulse,
    NativeSequence,
    SingleQubitNatives,
    TwoQubitNatives,
)

# create the qubit objects
qubit0 = Qubit(0)
qubit1 = Qubit(1)

# assign single-qubit native gates to each qubit
qubit0.native_gates = SingleQubitNatives(
    RX=NativePulse(
        name="RX",
        duration=40,
        amplitude=0.05,
        shape="Gaussian(5)",
        pulse_type=PulseType.DRIVE,
        qubit=qubit0,
        frequency=int(4.7e9),
    ),
    MZ=NativePulse(
        name="MZ",
        duration=1000,
        amplitude=0.005,
        shape="Rectangular()",
        pulse_type=PulseType.READOUT,
        qubit=qubit0,
        frequency=int(7e9),
    ),
)
qubit1.native_gates = SingleQubitNatives(
    RX=NativePulse(
        name="RX",
        duration=40,
        amplitude=0.05,
        shape="Gaussian(5)",
        pulse_type=PulseType.DRIVE,
        qubit=qubit1,
        frequency=int(5.1e9),
    ),
    MZ=NativePulse(
        name="MZ",
        duration=1000,
        amplitude=0.005,
        shape="Rectangular()",
        pulse_type=PulseType.READOUT,
        qubit=qubit1,
        frequency=int(7.5e9),
    ),
)

# define the pair of qubits
pair = QubitPair(qubit0, qubit1)
pair.native_gates = TwoQubitNatives(
    CZ=NativeSequence(
        name="CZ",
        pulses=[
            NativePulse(
                name="CZ1",
                duration=30,
                amplitude=0.005,
                shape="Rectangular()",
                pulse_type=PulseType.FLUX,
                qubit=qubit1,
            )
        ],
    )
)

The platform automatically creates the connectivity graph of the given chip using the dictionary of qibolab.qubits.QubitPair objects.

Registering platforms#

The create() function defined in the above example can be called or imported directly in any Python script. Alternatively, it is also possible to make the platform available as

from qibolab import Platform

# Define platform and load specific runcard
platform = Platform("my_platform")

To do so, create() needs to be saved in a module called my_platform.py and the environment flag QIBOLAB_PLATFORMS needs to point to the directory that contains this module. Examples of advanced platforms are available at this repository.

Using runcards#

Operating a QPU requires calibrating a set of parameters, the number of which increases with the number of qubits. Hardcoding such parameters in the create() function, as shown in the above examples, is not scalable. However, since create() is part of a Python module, is is possible to load parameters from an external file or database.

Qibolab provides some utility functions, accessible through qibolab.serialize, for loading calibration parameters stored in a YAML file with a specific format. We call such file a runcard. Here is a runcard for a two-qubit system:

nqubits: 2

qubits: [0, 1]

settings:
    nshots: 1024
    sampling_rate: 1000000000
    relaxation_time: 50_000

topology: [[0, 1]]

native_gates:
    single_qubit:
        0: # qubit number
            RX:
                duration: 40
                amplitude: 0.0484
                frequency: 4_855_663_000
                shape: Drag(5, -0.02)
                type: qd # qubit drive
                start: 0
                phase: 0
            MZ:
                duration: 620
                amplitude: 0.003575
                frequency: 7_453_265_000
                shape: Rectangular()
                type: ro # readout
                start: 0
                phase: 0
        1: # qubit number
            RX:
                duration: 40
                amplitude: 0.05682
                frequency: 5_800_563_000
                shape: Drag(5, -0.04)
                type: qd # qubit drive
                start: 0
                phase: 0
            MZ:
                duration: 960
                amplitude: 0.00325
                frequency: 7_655_107_000
                shape: Rectangular()
                type: ro # readout
                start: 0
                phase: 0

    two_qubit:
        0-1:
            CZ:
            - duration: 30
              amplitude: 0.055
              shape: Rectangular()
              qubit: 1
              relative_start: 0
              type: qf
            - type: virtual_z
              phase: -1.5707963267948966
              qubit: 0
            - type: virtual_z
              phase: -1.5707963267948966
              qubit: 1

characterization:
    single_qubit:
        0:
            readout_frequency: 7_453_265_000
            drive_frequency: 4_855_663_000
            T1: 0.0
            T2: 0.0
            sweetspot: -0.047
            # parameters for single shot classification
            threshold: 0.00028502261712637096
            iq_angle: 1.283105298787488
        1:
            readout_frequency: 7_655_107_000
            drive_frequency: 5_800_563_000
            T1: 0.0
            T2: 0.0
            sweetspot: -0.045
            # parameters for single shot classification
            threshold: 0.0002694329123116206
            iq_angle: 4.912447775569025

This file contains different sections: qubits is a list with the qubit names, settings defines default execution parameters, topology defines the qubit connectivity (qubit pairs), native_gates specifies the calibrated pulse parameters for implementing single and two-qubit gates and characterization provides the physical parameters associated to each qubit. Note that such parameters may slightly differ depending on the QPU architecture, however the pulses under native_gates should comply with the qibolab.pulses.Pulse API and the parameters under characterization should be a subset of qibolab.qubits.Qubit attributes.

Providing the above runcard is not sufficient to instantiate a qibolab.platform.Platform. This should still be done using a create() method, however this is significantly simplified by qibolab.serialize. Here is the create() method that loads the parameters of the above runcard:

from pathlib import Path
from qibolab import Platform
from qibolab.channels import ChannelMap, Channel
from qibolab.serialize import load_runcard, load_qubits, load_settings
from qibolab.instruments.dummy import DummyInstrument


def create():
    # Create a controller instrument
    instrument = DummyInstrument("my_instrument", "0.0.0.0:0")

    # Create channel objects and assign to them the controller ports
    channels = ChannelMap()
    channels |= Channel("ch1out", port=instrument["o1"])
    channels |= Channel("ch2", port=instrument["o2"])
    channels |= Channel("ch3", port=instrument["o3"])
    channels |= Channel("ch1in", port=instrument["i1"])

    # create ``Qubit`` and ``QubitPair`` objects by loading the runcard
    runcard = load_runcard(Path(__file__).parent / "my_platform.yml")
    qubits, pairs = load_qubits(runcard)

    # assign channels to the qubit
    for q in range(2):
        qubits[q].readout = channels["ch1out"]
        qubits[q].feedback = channels["ch1in"]
        qubits[q].drive = channels[f"ch{q + 2}"]

    # create dictionary of instruments
    instruments = {instrument.name: instrument}
    # load ``settings`` from the runcard
    settings = load_settings(runcard)
    return Platform(
        "my_platform", qubits, pairs, instruments, settings, resonator_type="2D"
    )

Note that this assumes that the runcard is saved as my_platform.yml in the same directory with the Python file that contains create().