My name is Adam, and I am a PhD researcher in Computer Science at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada. My research focuses on quantum computing, and I am particularly interested in exploring photonic quantum systems.
I would like to request access to Xanadu Cloud to learn and run programs, ideally on one of your photonic quantum machines. Having access to your platform would greatly support my academic work and help me deepen my understanding of photonic quantum computing.
I would be deeply grateful if you could assist me with the sign-up process or guide me on the necessary steps to gain access.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.
At the moment we only have one device available online which is our X8 device. It’s a device from 2019 so it’s small and old. It can’t be used for much except very specific research in photonics (you can’t do much computing there).
If you’re interested in quantum computing I can recommend PennyLane, or if you’re interested in learning about photonic quantum computing (and specifically Xanadu’s hardware) I can recommend the following resources:
I generally recommend starting with the videos and the PennyLane tutorial of photonics (the top two on the list). Strawberry Fields is the old library that you need to use in order to connect to X8, and the documentation has some theory and tutorials too.
If you go to the Strawberry Fields website you’ll note that the gates and everything is different (see the table here for reference). There’s no exact parallel or transformation between the gates that you may already know and the photonic gates available in this device.
All of this to say, I recommend that you first look into these resources and decide whether our X8 hardware will actually help you or if it might in fact not be relevant and distract you from your research. If you do indeed need the access to X8 let me know and I’ll DM you with the info to request access, which then needs to be reviewed by another team here at Xanadu.
Sorry for the long answer but I hope these resources can help you.
Thank you for the warm welcome and for sharing all those helpful resources—I really appreciate the detailed guidance on photonic quantum computing and the X8 device.
I’ve had a chance to review the materials you recommended, and I believe the X8 could be relevant to my research. Therefore, I would like to request access to the X8 device. Please let me know what the next steps are, and I’ll be happy to provide any additional details needed.
Your proposal seems ambitious and oriented at devices that we do not have yet. I know that you want to use quantum hardware but, have you considered doing everything in simulation first? Note that you can add noise models to your simulations if that’s your concern.
Our X8 device is designed for Gaussian Boson sampling, instead of universal quantum computation. Are you sure that it’s going to be well suited for your research project? On the other hand, have you estimated how many qumodes you would need in order to run your method?
I know that I’m asking a lot of questions but I think they’re key so that you can choose the right tools for your project.