QSystem

Qsystem is a modular software framework designed to manage experimental workflows in quantum information science and related fields. It provides tools to describe experiments, allocate hardware resources, execute tasks on heterogeneous backends, and aggregate data for analysis. The design emphasizes reproducibility, provenance, and interoperability across diverse controllers and simulators.

Origin and development of Qsystem trace its roots to an open-source initiative in the early 2020s, built through contributions from researchers, engineers, and institutions worldwide. The project aims to standardize workflow descriptions via a lightweight domain-specific language and to offer a pluggable architecture capable of accommodating new hardware interfaces and simulation tools.

Architecture and components consist of a central orchestration engine, a data backend, and client libraries. Core elements include Qcore (execution engine), Qstore (data management), Qdsl (experiment description language), Qviz (visualization tools), and a plugin API (Qext). Communication relies on REST and gRPC, with support for authentication, role-based access, and audit trails. The system emphasizes a microservices approach and is designed for containerized deployment, enabling scalable and repeatable workflows across laboratories.

Key features include workflow automation, resource scheduling, experiment versioning and lineage, metadata capture, and robust import/export of data in JSON, CSV, and HDF5 formats. It supports reproducible run containers, detailed logging, and integration with common calibration and measurement libraries, promoting consistency across experiments.

Applications span universities, research institutes, and industry startups, where Qsystem facilitates orchestration of quantum device experiments, simulations, calibrations, and data analysis pipelines. Its focus on interoperability and open extensibility has aided collaboration and the replication of experimental workflows.

See also: Quantum computing, workflow management systems, data provenance.