First Operating System for Quantum Networks Successfully Created

Researchers created the first operating system for quantum networks, making it easier to link quantum computers to each other.

“By building only hardware, we make quantum networks useless.” Stephanie Wenner At Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She has been working on connecting quantum computers to a network for a long time. This allows for the exchange of information very safely and perform calculations in new ways, but this requires understanding of the technical nity-gritty of each device involved. Together with her colleagues, Wehner has now developed a way to run quantum networks more universally.

The operating systems the team has built are software that allows you to control devices within a quantum network regardless of the type of qubit or qubit that make them. Such control devices become more difficult due to the fact that networked quantum computers receive both quantum information from other quantum computers and traditional signals from classical computers that serve the interface.

To demonstrate that an operating system called Qnodeos can handle both, researchers tested it on two types of quantum computers and several different tasks. They used two quantum computers made from specially processed diamonds and another quantum computer made from electric charged atoms. Using these two types of quantum hardware, researchers ran a delegated quantum computing test program, similar to using laptops to perform calculations in the cloud. We also tested the ability of Qnodeos to handle multitasking by running two programs at once.

Joe Fitzsimmons At the Quantum Computing Startup Horizon Quantum, based in Singapore and Ireland, it states that this is a major advance in laying the foundations of the quantum internet. He says, “If you start to take the idea of ​​seriously building a general-purpose quantum network, there's a lot to do,” and the new operating system will lead to a long list of things to develop next, such as routing protocols.

Wehner says that Qnodeos development is like creating coloring pages. They outline all the shapes and struggle to color them all. For example, the work raised the question of how to write a scheduling program for quantum networks. “This wasn't even on my radar before, but now I'm very excited,” she says.