QIR Alliance is part of the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation work on open standards

SAN FRANCISCO, November 30, 2021 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the new QIR Alliance, a joint effort to establish an intermediate representation with the goal to facilitate interoperability within the quantum ecosystem and provide a representation suitable for current and future heterogenous quantum processors. Founding members include Honeywell, Microsoft, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Quantum Circuits Inc. and Rigetti Computing. 

QIR, or Quantum Intermediate Representation, is based on the popular open source LLVM compiler toolchain. QIR specifies a set of rules for representing quantum programs within the LLVM IR. Examples of QIR applications include using the standard LLVM infrastructure to write quantum optimizers that operate on QIR and target it to specific hardware backends or linking it with classical high performance libraries for quantum simulation.

“We expect there to be exciting advances in how classical and quantum computations can interact at the hardware level. The QIR Alliance will provide a single representation that can be used for both today’s restricted capabilities and the more powerful systems of the future,” said Bettina Heim, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft. “This will allow the community to experiment with and develop optimizations and code transformations that work in a variety of use cases.”

Quantum development SDKs and languages appear and evolve at a fast pace, along with new quantum processors with unique and distinct capabilities from each other. To provide interoperability between new languages and new hardware capabilities and reduce development effort from all parties, it is imperative for the ecosystem to develop and share a forward-looking intermediate representation that works with present and future quantum hardware.

“Quantum technology is still quite nascent but the promise grows every day,” said Seth Newberry, general manager of standards at Joint Development Foundation. “The QIR Alliance is poised to enable the open and technical development necessary to realize these promises. We’re very happy to provide a forum for this work.”

For more information, please visit: https://qir-alliance.org 

Member Quotes

Honeywell

“The Quantum-Intermediate Representation Alliance, also known as QIRA, is a key piece of the quantum computing ecosystem that enables quantum hardware suppliers and quantum software suppliers to reduce redundant efforts involved in implementing programming languages across quantum computer architectures,” said Alex Chernoguzov, Honeywell Quantum Chief Engineer, Honeywell.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

“ORNL is thrilled to be a part of the Quantum Intermediate Representation Alliance, which aims to develop a unified LLVM-based intermediate representation for quantum computing. A consistent IR of quantum programs will enable interoperability between quantum applications and hardware devices, making quantum computing more usable to researchers and developers. We look forward to contributing to the QIR specification and the associated compiler toolchain under this partnership,” said Thien Nguyen, Quantum Computer Science Researcher, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Quantum Circuits Inc.

At QCI, we are very pleased to be participating in the QIR Alliance. The QIR approach represents a revolutionary advance in the representation of quantum circuits, enabling users to take full advantage of the unique capabilities of quantum computing systems across a variety of different hardware platforms,” said Tom Lubinski, Chief Software Architect of Quantum Circuits Inc.

Rigetti

“Rigetti has pioneered hybrid system architectures that are quickly becoming the predominant approach for cloud-based quantum computing” said David Rivas, SVP Systems & Services at Rigetti Computing. “The QIR Alliance is focusing on precisely the interface between quantum and classical compute, enabling rapid advances in quantum programming language design and execution systems. We’re thrilled to be working closely with this community to design the necessary compiler technology and develop implementations for Rigetti hardware.”

About Joint Development Foundation

Launched in 2015, the Joint Development Foundation (the Joint Development Foundation) is an independent non-profit organization that provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable groups to quickly establish and operate standards and source code development collaborations. More information about the Joint Development Foundation is available at http://www.jointdevelopment.org/.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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Story Changes Culture

503-867-2304

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Formerly Singularity, the newly named Apptainer project delivers a feature set that supports both application and microservice use cases

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.,  — November 30, 2021— The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host the Apptainer project. Formerly the Singularity project, Apptainer is the most widely used container system for High-Performance (HPC) computing and is one of the container systems uniquely suited for both enterprise and HPC use cases. It is designed to execute applications at bare-metal performance while being secure, portable and completely reproducible.

“The Apptainer project has had massive growth and needs a neutral home with proven open source governance to support its next development and adoption phase,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and Founder and Project Lead of Singularity/Apptainer. “The Linux Foundation is the natural host for Apptainer, where it can also collaborate with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Open Container Initiative, OpenHPC and other projects to expand its ecosystem.”

The HPC community for many years has been isolated from the enterprise and cloud sectors of

the ecosystem, but those barriers are starting to come down. HPC consumers are looking to

modernize and take advantage of enterprise tech and enterprises are looking to make use of

decades of optimizations in performance and parallelization through use-cases like Artificial

Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and compute- and data-driven analytics.

“The Apptainer project is at a pivotal moment in its growth and evolution,” said Mike Dolan,

senior vice president and general manager of projects at the Linux Foundation. “We look

forward to supporting this community and enabling cross collaboration with even more open

source developers and technologists to expand its ecosystem of contributors.”

Apptainer features include: public/private key signing of containers; Docker- and

OCI-compatible; container encryption and integration with Vault and other management

platforms; single-file SIF executable container format; runs “rootless” and prohibits privilege

escalation within the container; and supports GPU, FPGA, high-speed networks and

filesystems, among others.

For more information about Apptainer, please visit: http://www.apptainer.org

Supporting Comments

“For an open source project to be healthy, there needs to be a clear separation between the project and commercial support options.  Both are critical, and I see this move as a step in the right direction to ensure commercial viability and a healthy community,” said Brent Gorda, HPC veteran.

AMD

“The Apptainer project has been an important step for containerization in high performance computing, driving an open-source platform that allows users to run complex applications on HPC clusters in a simple, portable, and reproducible way. We’re excited to see the Singularity project rebranded as the Apptainer project under The Linux Foundation and continue to provide the HPC community access to open-source container software that’s critical for HPC,” said Brock Taylor, Global HPC Solutions Director, AMD.

Berkeley Lab

“As the founding organization, we are thrilled that Singularity[1] has experienced such broad adoption in HPC, and we are really looking forward to seeing its maturing to the next level now,” said Gary Jung, Scientific Computing Group Lead at LBNL. “The time has never been better to move this technology to the Linux Foundation, where both the HPC and Enterprise communities can collaborate and build this container system for the future.”

Fermilab

“The health of Apptainer as an open source project is of vital importance to the High Energy Physics community and the OSG consortium which both use Apptainer in their High Throughput Computing and High Performance Computing every day to advance their science missions. The CIO of Fermilab and the OSG executive team endorse this move of the Apptainer open source project to Linux Foundation hosting and expect it to help ensure the long term health of the project,” said Dave Dykstra, Fermilab.

HPCNow!

“For a global HPC consulting company like HPCNow!, moving Apptainer to a Linux Foundation project not only represents another massive step in maturity level but also ensures the future of this extraordinary technology. The evolution of Apptainer is extremely important for our clients, who widely adopted this strategic software to guarantee portability, long-term reproducibility, and performance,” said Jordi Blasco, CTO at HPCNow.

Intel

“Intel is a long supporter of the power of open source to unite and accelerate ecosystems.  As a user of Apptainer, we strongly support the contribution of Apptainer to the Linux Foundation and look forward to seeing the communities’ engagement in driving this project forward,” said Sanjiv Shah, Vice President – Software and Advanced Technology Group, General Manager of Developer Software Engineering.

Sandia National Laboratories

“Apptainer can support scalable containers on HPC and Cloud infrastructure, so its move to the Linux Foundation is both exciting and a natural evolution of this important technology,” said Andrew Younge from Sandia National Laboratories. “We’re looking forward to continuing to work with the project and participating in the growing community at the Linux Foundation.”

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation and its projects are supported by more than 1,800 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, Hyperledger, RISC-V, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contacts

Jennifer Cloer

503-867-2304

jennifer@storychangesculture.com

[1] Singularity is the former name of the Apptainer project.

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The Importance of Neutrality

Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) at our member organizations recognize the importance of neutral governance in the projects they choose to take a dependency on for themselves. They also recognize the importance of “doubling down” on engineering investment. 

These organizations typically are past the stage where they want to be strictly consumers of open source software; they’re ready to be participants (hopefully among many) in the actual development process of the software and tools they are using. They ultimately recognize that the ancillary benefits are significant even if the technical vision might change from their internal priorities.

There are clear benefits to having their projects work under an open governance model designed to encourage other organizations to participate and contribute under a “do-ocracy” where the people doing the work make the decisions for the project community. 

A neutral home for projects can bring stability and trust, such as the community not worrying about the parent pulling back the source code or somehow acting against the community’s interests. It also eliminates any distinction between “Commercial Open Source Software,” where some permissions in the software are limited, and fully open versions of the software. 

The TODO Group: OSPO Collaboration

TODO is an open group of organizations that collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open source projects and programs. TODO Group functions as a community to bring the people managing Open Source Program Offices (OSPO) together in a meaningful way; check out the OSPO Landscape (ospolandscape.org) for some examples, or the OSPO101.org materials found at github.com/todogroup/ospo101.

TODO Group publishes guides on collected best practices from the leading companies engaged in open source development. These guides (todogroup.org/guides) aim to help organizations successfully implement and run an open source program office. The TODO Group also hosted the first OSPOCon in North America and Europe this year.

TODO published its 2021 Annual OSPO Survey results in September. The findings indicated there are many opportunities ahead to educate companies about how OSPOs can benefit them.

OSPO Structure: Professionalization continued among OSPOs, with 58% formally structured programs up from 54% the previous year. Prospects for more funding brightened compared to 2020.OSPO Benefits and Responsibilities: OSPOs had a positive impact on their sponsors’ software practices, but their benefits differed depending on the size of an organization.Organizations without an OSPO: Almost half of the survey participants without an OSPO believed it would help their company, but of those that didn’t think it would help, 35% said they haven’t even considered it.Value of Open Source Participation: 27% of survey participants said a company’s open source participation is at least very influential in their organization’s buying decisions.

FinOps: Cloud Financial Operations‭ ‬

The FinOps Foundation joined the LF’s family of communities in June of 2020. Its mission is to advance the discipline of cloud financial operations (“FinOps”) through best practices, education, and standards among individuals responsible for cloud billing and operations.

The FinOps Foundation includes 4000 individual members worldwide and 40 corporate vendor members, including Google, VMware, Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, and others. In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the cloud’s business value by bringing together technology, business, and finance professionals with a new cultural set, knowledge skills, and technical processes. 

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support the TODO Group and the FinOps Foundation.

To learn how your organization can get involved with TODO Group, click here 

To learn how your organization can get involved with FinOps Foundation, click here 

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