Fire Opal overview

Fire Opal is a Python package that provides a simple interface to apply complex quantum control techniques to quantum algorithms. When executing an algorithm on today's generally available quantum hardware devices, you will notice that as circuits become more complex and require a greater number of qubits, the results of execution look increasingly similar to a randomized distribution. It's often difficult to distinguish the ideal output from the noise.

This noise, inherently caused by environmental impacts on quantum processors, must be mitigated in order to get useful results from quantum algorithms. Fire Opal employs advanced error mitigation and noise suppression methods to optimize the circuit, hardware, and runtime, which drastically improves success probability.

Get the right answer, right now

Fire Opal applies the best error suppression and noise mitigation techniques demonstrated to improve performance by up to 9,000x. The performance improvements have been validated across several different algorithms, both deterministic and variational.

Typically, running a circuit with Fire Opal will always produce better results than without, but you can also learn how to maximize the benefits gained from Fire Opal.

Deploy with ease

Implementing error suppression using common development frameworks requires deep technical understanding and specialized configuration for each type of hardware and algorithm. Fire Opal eliminates this burden by providing a single execute command that is both algorithm- and platform-agnostic. Simply input the circuit, number of shots, your hardware platform credentials, and your hardware of choice. Fire Opal will optimize and run the circuit, returning improved results.

The Get started guide provides an example of how to apply Fire Opal to a Bernstein–Vazirani algorithm.

Save time and resources

By eliminating sampling overhead and performing a single execution, Fire Opal signficantly reduces development costs. The validate function saves you time and money by checking to make sure that the circuit is error-free and can be run on the specified hardware. While most hardware providers will still execute and bill you for circuits that can't feasibly be run, the execute function will provide a warning if your circuit is nearing hardware limitations, and it will throw an error if the circuit cannnot be executed.

Check out the Fire Opal references for more information on how to implement Fire Opal.

Methodology

Leveraging Fire Opal doesn't require any knowledge of the underlying quantum control techniques, but if you're interested in understanding how the technology works, check out our technical manuscript.