The choice of which framework software to use for our circuit-based approach was not a particularly hard one for us. We have our own experiment in the lab which implements a non-standard device for quantum simulation and thus some of our requirements are (roughly in order of importance):
Lets give a brief overview of how we answered those questions with regard to PennyLane.
PennyLane is designed for users to write and use their own plugin, which is what they call the integration of quantum computing devices into the framework. Officially, it only supports
qubit and
continuous variable devices and not more general approaches but we may be able to
integrate bosonic and fermionic atoms flexibly as the code itself is not very restricted. Other big platorms like
Qiskit,
Forest and
Strawberry Fields focus exclusively on their own quantum computing hardware or simulator without the possibility to integrate your own. PennyLane is
open-source and Python-based, which is perfect as the
Labscript Suite controlling our experiment is so, too. Additionally, the company behind PennyLane,
Xanadu, is a partly academic player who is very open in their publications and
supports a great community around the software. The framework allows to add simulators to the framework device which mirror the functionality of the hardware. It performs various parameter range checks for the system and the operations used. Not built-in is user a system for management which allows only registered users to run the experiment from a queue. We would have to implement this ourselves.