In May 2020, Riverlane revealed that they will lead a consortium which has been awarded a £7.6m grant to build a radically new operating system for quantum computers. The team marked a ‘hello world’ moment in September, with the first successful trials of Deltaflow.OS, using quantum hardware belonging to leading trapped-ion company, Oxford Ionics.
The latest milestone is the public release of the first version of Deltaflow.OS; ‘Deltaflow-on-ARTIQ’. The product has been built to enable quantum hardware companies as well as algorithm and app developers to accelerate their research by making collaboration easier and reduce down-time in labs. This version uses simulated hardware and ARTIQ as a backend. ARTIQ is a control system which is widely used in the trapped-ion community. Deltaflow-on-ARTIQ consists of the Deltaflow language (Deltalanguage), and various hardware models on which the language can be run, including an emulator of the ARTIQ control system. The Deltalanguage lets users define a graph of different hardware nodes corresponding to the type of hardware elements found in labs. After defining a programme, users can test it on increasingly realistic hardware models.
Robert Jördens of M-Labs commented, “My hands are twitching because I really want to see and try that emulator and Deltaflow. There are so many valuable pieces in there.”
A first public demonstration of Deltaflow.OS took place at the virtual National Quantum Technologies Showcase on 6 November 2020, where the team demonstrated how a Rabi-Oscillation would be performed.
The release of Deltaflow-on-ARTIQ marks a significant step towards Riverlane’s mission to build a quantum operating system that is high performance, portable across all qubit technologies and scalable to millions of qubits.