2025-06-16 –, Palais Atelier
In this talk we present current progress on Mahout's new quantum compute layer named Qumat. We will give an overview of the project, explain why we built Qumat, and show its current state. We will present a demo of Qumat in action, and end with calls to action for researchers and engineers interested in using it and contributing to the project.
Following Mahout's core values of interoperability and providing tools for matrix arithmetic at scale, we have added a new layer (qumat) alongside our existing distributed matrix math framework (Samsara), that allows quantum researchers and developers to write code once and run it on any back-end available.
As with distributed compute systems like Spark and Flink, moving from one platform to another typically requires a complete code rewrite. This is prohibitive in most cases, but Samsara allows machine learning researchers and developers one unified interface to write code once and port instantly to another platform if it is deemed necessary.
Similarly for quantum computing, multiple vendors (IBM, GCP, and AWS to name a few) have their own libraries for accessing their cloud quantum compute services, such as qiskit, cirq, and braket. To give the same flexibility in the quantum area, qumat corrals all these libraries under one interface, allowing users to focus on building circuits and writing algorithms rather than adapting to one particular library.
Data Science, Scale
Level:Intermediate
Trevor Grant is getting back into speaking at conferences after a hiatus from an otherwise prolific career that was put on pause during the pandemic. During his pause he became a father, published a book (Kubeflow for Machine Learning: From Lab to Production), had a second son, consulted for a while, went back to work for IBM Research, and became car free (this list is not ordered chronologically nor by significance). He has been putzing around generative AI since ~2017, and someday hopes to give a talk on his Star Trek Chat bots of 2018-2020. His primary open source interests at the moment is the qumat project of Apache Mahout, and the gofannon project of The AI Alliance
Andrew works on data and analytics, and runs software teams for a living. He has contributed to the Apache Mahout project for over a decade and has been an ASF member for four years.