India’s first ever Quantum Computer Simulator (QSim) Toolkit has been launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. This indigenous toolkit will enable researchers and students to carry out research in Quantum Computing in a cost effective manner.

QSim is an outcome of the project “Design and Development of Quantum Computer Toolkit (Simulator, Workbench) and Capacity Building”. This is one of the first initiatives in the country to address the common challenge of advancing the Quantum Computing research frontiers in India. This project is being executed collaboratively by IISC Bangalore, IIT Roorkee, and C-DAC with the support of MeitY.

QSim allows researchers and students to write and debug Quantum Code that is essential for developing Quantum Algorithms. Quantum systems are highly sensitive to disturbances from environment, so much so that even necessary controls and observations perturb them. The available and upcoming Quantum devices are noisy and techniques to bring down the environmental error rate are being intensively pursued. QSim allows researchers to explore Quantum Algorithms under idealised conditions and help prepare experiments to run on actual Quantum Hardware. 

QSim can serve as an important educational/research tool providing an excellent way to attract students/researchers to the field of Quantum Technology and provide a platform to acquire the skills of ‘programming’ as well as ‘designing’ real Quantum Hardware.

Feature Highlights of QSim include:

• Intuitive UI: QSim offers a robust QC Simulator integrated with a graphical user interface (GUI) based Workbench allowing students/researchers to create Quantum programs, visualise the instant circuit generation and simulated outputs.
• Simulate noisy Quantum logic circuits: Helps simulate Quantum circuits with and without noise and test how well various algorithms work with imperfect quantum components. This is essential to simulate real-life conditions.
• Pre-loaded Quantum algorithms and examples: QSim comes loaded with Quantum programs and algorithms providing a head start to the users. E.g. QFT, Deutsch Jozsa, Grovers, and so on.
• Integrated with HPC: The quantum simulations are performed on powerful HPC resources allowing multiple users to submit jobs simultaneously with different qubit configurations.

During the virtual event on 27 August, 2021, Sh. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, launched the toolkit. Many other dignitaries joined the event, including Sh. Ajay Prakash Sawhney, and senior officers from MeitY; Prof. K. Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor to Govt. Of India; Prof. Govindan Rangarajan, Director, IISc Bangalore; Prof. Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee; Ms. Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM; Dr. Sudhir Kamat, DG (MED&COS), DRDO.

Addressing the event, Sh. Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that we are coming to an era where conventional computing power growth through the traditional means of silicon and semiconductor is drawing to a close and now we are going to see that the next generation of computing power growth comes from a combination of software, new architectures, system redesign and new system paradigms and that is where the quantum computing comes and is clearly going to be the cutting edge of the future demands of computing power. QSim is the Gateway for Indian scientists to take us in that direction.

Sh. Chandrasekhar further added that as a nation we have come a long way as community of scientists. He expressed his happiness that QSim is a result of collaborative efforts of research and development which is a way to grow our technological capabilities. He said that we have tremendous amount of talent in this country. Future of our nation's technological capabilities will be driven to a large extent by how effectively we work in a collaborative manner and pick and assemble the best brains from across the country to create the technologies of future. Ministry of Electronics and IT is determined to help our country grow its technological capabilities. With collaborative model of working, India can reach greater heights in terms of technology leadership of the world.

Speaking on the occasion, Shri Ajay Prakash Sawhney said that QSim is a very initial step and this would be strengthened by the MTech program that has already been launched by IISc Bangalore. Taking the lead from IISc Bangalore, other institutes might also like to join that because strength that we have in India is of human resource and with this strength we may go deeper and deeper into any technology whatsoever.