Subject: [Qirg] QuISP: open source Quantum Internet simulator

From: Rodney Van Meter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 18:08:06 +0900

<chair hat off, indiviidual researcher/team leader hat on>

At tomorrow’s meeting, this is the software I’ll be introducing.

tl;dr:
See
https://aqua.sfc.wide.ad.jp/quisp_website/
https://github.com/sfc-aqua/quisp
for the open source release of our quantum Internet simulator!
The first public alpha release, Armstrong, is available at
https://github.com/sfc-aqua/quisp/releases/tag/0.1.0
and
https://github.com/sfc-aqua/quisp/blob/master/doc/running-demos.md
for screen shots of some of the demos.  My 30-minute talk on this is at
https://virtualmarchmeeting.com/presentations/ruleset-based-operation-of-the-quantum-internet
and the single best resource on the simulator is Takaaki Matsuo's
master's thesis:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10758
We also have a Slack workspace set up and ready for you to join:
https://aqua-quisp.slack.com
let me know if you want an invitation.

The very long email:

I hope in these extraordinary times you're staying as safe as
possible.  Tokyo has been rising the last couple of weeks, after
hanging on a knife's edge for weeks before that.  Prime Minister Abe
will declare an emergency today, but it's not clear how things will
go.  Michal, Satoh and I and our students are (mostly) in Kanagawa
prefecture, next door to Tokyo (~1 million people a day typically
cross the border into Tokyo), but things are better here.  Hopefully
they will stay that way, and hopefully Japan and the rest of the world
mitigate the growth and overall human cost.  I'm worried about family,
friends and collaborators in India, Indonesia, Italy, Iran (all the I
countries?), France, Thailand, and of course the U.S., though.

As it happens, the worst of this hit while we were already on the
spring inter-semester break.  Normally the school year ends around
Feb. 1, then the new year starts the week of Apr. 1.  Keio has pushed
back the official start of classes to Apr. 30, slightly shortened the
semester, and agreed to work through the normal Golden Week spring
break in late April/early May.  We are moving many, but not all, of
our classes online; I set all of mine to be online.  (Taking care of
the staff is another matter; since I'm no longer vice dean I'm out of
the loop on that, but I hope they will be able to work effectively
remotely as well.)

Personally, staying focused has never been my strong suit, and
certainly the current worries don't make that better, but my team has
taken full advantage of the extra time to make tremendous forward
progress, and canceling a couple of trips gave me some time to work.
Although we're planning some actual experiments for this year, at the
moment everything is either coding, theory work, or a little bit of
design, so we're facing fewer challenges than many people.

All of which brings me to the main point of writing today...

You've seen video of our Quantum Internet simulator in action.  Well,
we are making it open source!

In particular, I must thank Ryosuke "cocori" Satoh.  cocori begins his
senior year this month, and is already involved in multiple research
projects.  He has driven most of the implementation of the current
version of QuISP over the last three months.  And, of course, QuISP
served as Takaaki Matsuo's master's thesis.  Takaaki carried it from
ideas on paper to a working system.  They are both absolutely
outstanding, and the project would have gone nowhere without either of
them.  For the full, extensive set of contributors, see the Authors
file included in the distribution.

We hope that you will try out the simulator, let us know what you
think, and contribute to its development, if you can.  I have to warn
you that this is definitely alpha release, but if you are brave, we'd
love to have you involved.

You'll find quite a bit of documentation at the website above,
including the current status of features, a description of our goals
(which we think are quite different than those of the other simulators
that are in development, and rather ambitious in scale), etc.  Feel
free to ask questions in the Slack channels, beg for help with the
installation, offer us compliments and bits of food (well, virtually,
anyway), open issues when you find bugs or want new features, to write
code or documentation and submit pull requests via github, and most
especially to download and use the simulator!

Looking forward to seeing you online.  Enjoy!

--Rod

Rodney Van Meter
Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
Keio University, Japan
[email-masked]