The QNE Application Development Kit

To make it possible for everyone to extend our Quantum Network Explorer with new applications, we have developed the Application Development Kit for Quantum Network Explorer (QNE-ADK). QNE-ADK includes everything that is needed to build quantum network applications yourself. After installing QNE-ADK you are ready to go. QNE-ADK offers a command line interface (CLI) with commands to create the necessary files that define applications and experiments. Some of these files need to be developed based upon your applications requirements. Commands are added that do some basic validation of the application and experiment files. When your experiment is configured you can run the experiment on the local simulator and examine the results when the run was successful. For now, QNE-ADK is only available locally. Remote operations will be added in future updates.

License model of QNE-ADK is MIT License.

Installation

Before installing QNE-ADK, it is important to mention that it is only supported for a modern Linux or MacOS (10 or 11) 64-bit (x86_64) operating system. If you don't have that, you can use a VirtualBox. If you are using Windows 10 or 11, you can also use the Bash on Ubuntu subsystem. Furthermore, you should use a virtual environment containing Python version 3.7 or higher and pip version 19 or higher.

To install QNE-ADK, execute the following command:

pip install qne-adk

After installing the qne-adk, you can install SquidASM. SquidASM is a library based on NetSquid, a quantum network simulator. It allows you to run your applications without the need of a physical quantum network. Even when one is available, it's still faster to develop locally using the simulator and only testing on the actual network when needed. To use SquidASM, we need NetSquid credentials, which can be obtained by registering on their forum.

Replace '{netsquid-user-name}' and '{netsquid-password}' in the following command to install SquidASM.

pip install squidasm --extra-index-url=
https://{netsquid-user-name}:{netsquid-password}@pypi.netsquid.org

Now that everything is set up and ready, you can start developing your first application!