Development and Deployment of Quantum Services

Abstract

Quantum computing is advancing by leaps and bounds to become a commercial reality. This revolutionary new technology aims to improve essential areas such as cybersecurity, financial services, and medicine. The growth of this technology has encouraged different research centers and big companies such as IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to dedicate considerable efforts to the development of new technologies that bring quantum computing to the market. However, these technologies are not yet mature and create a major problem of vendor lock-in. Therefore, new techniques and tools are needed to facilitate access to this technology and to allow developers to increase the level of abstraction at which they work. In this chapter, we perform a technical comparison between different quantum computing service providers using a case study by performing empirical tests based on the Traveling Salesman Problem. This study highlights the differences between the major providers. To address these differences and reduce the vendor lock-in effect, we made three proposals: an extension of the Quantum API Gateway to support the different vendors; a code generator making use of a modification of the OpenAPI specification; and a workflow to automate the continuous deployment of these services making use of GitHub Actions. This would allow programmers to deploy quantum code without specific knowledge of the major vendors, which would facilitate access and simplify the development of quantum applications.