Julia

Julia is a high-performance, high-level programming language known for its ease of use and impressive computational capabilities, especially in numerical and scientific computing, machine learning, data science, and most recently, quantum computing! Julia is available on qBraid Lab with pre-configured IJulia notebooks, and with a number of quantum computing software packages pre-installed.

Bloqade Lab Image

Bloqade is a Julia Language package developed for quantum computation and quantum simulation based on the neutral-atom architecture with the ability to submit tasks to QuEra’s Aquila quantum processor. Bloqade is available working out-of-the-box through qBraid Lab, is free-to-use, and requires little to no setup. Built on top of Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS, this image includes:

The latest version of Julia and Bloqade
Yao.jl
Revise.jl
BenchmarkTools.jl
PythonCall.jl
Conda package manager, provided by Mamba
Jupyter Lab interface with dedicated Julia and Python kernels
Integrated Terminal for interactive command-line sessions

See qBraid system info for more.

Step 0: Redeem Access Key

Login to account.qbraid.com. On the left side of your dashboard, inside the Plan card, click Manage.

Scroll down to find the card marked Access Key. Enter code NEUTRALATOM and click Submit. This will grant you access to the Bloqade Lab image as well as a number of other premium features.

For more on creating an account and adding an access key, see Account.

Step 1: Select Image & Launch Lab

At the top of your account page, open the image drop down. Select the option named Bloqade_2vCPU_4GB, and then click Launch Lab. Pulling the Bloqade image may take 2-3 minutes the first time. The next time you launch Lab, it will load much more quickly. See Launch Lab.

Step 2: Develop with Notebooks or from Command-Line

Once qBraid Lab is loaded, you are all set! No further setup is required. In the middle of your screen you can click the Julia 1.9 kernel to open a new Jupyter Notebook configured with the Julia executable. Alternatively, you can click to open Terminal and run an interactive julia session from the command-line. In this qBraid Lab image, Bloqade is pre-installed and pre-compiled, so you should be able to get started using Bloqade right away.

Step 3: Explore More Features

The Environment Manager, located in the right sidebar of qBraid Lab, provides a graphical user interface for creating and managing Python virtual environments. This particular Lab image comes with a pre-installed Bloqade Python Wrapper environment. Clicking Activate will create a corresponding IPykernel, and allow you to run Jupyter Notebooks using the bloqade Python package.

In the bottom right corner qBraid Lab, click Start Tour for an interactive walkthrough. You can re-start the tour and access other useful links from the Help drop-down in the top menu bar. To stop and/or restart your session, click File > Hub Control Panel > Stop My Server. For more on the qBraid Lab interface, and managing your qBraid Lab session, see Getting Started.

Configuration

In qBraid Lab, the JULIA_DEPOT_PATH is set to /opt/.julia. This default setting means that any additional Julia packages installed will be stored at the system level, and therefore will not persist between sessions. To persist additional packages, caches, configs, and other Julia updates, they must be saved at the user level (e.g. /home/jovyan/.julia). This can be done by updating the depot path:

export JULIA_DEPOT_PATH="/home/jovyan/.julia:$JULIA_DEPOT_PATH"

See Julia environment variables for more.

Troubleshooting

Julia kernel not connecting

If you are unable to connect to the Julia kernel, make sure that you do not have any Project.toml or Manifest.toml in your working directory, as these project dependencies may conflict with pre-installed packages and cause the kernel to fail. If you are still having trouble, try restarting your session. If the problem continues to persist, please contact us.