(SiliconAngle) Amazon Web Services Inc. will play a central role in advancing quantum computing after announcing today that it has joined the steering council of the open-source PennyLane project.
PennyLane is a framework for what’s called “hybrid quantum computing,” which is an approach to quantum computing that involves using classical computing resources alongside quantum processors. The idea is that throwing classical computers into the mix helps to mitigate the effect of errors that are still inherent in today’s nascent quantum computing hardware.
The PennyLane framework was created by a company called Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc. It provides an interface to common machine learning libraries such as PyTorch and TensorFlow that are used to train machine learning models. It enables developers to use those libraries to train quantum circuits in the same way they train neural networks on traditional computers.
PennyLane’s core feature is that it implements a version of the back propagation algorithm, which is the main workhorse for training deep learning models, that’s naturally compatible with quantum machines.