TORONTO, January 26, 2022 — Agnostic, Inc.a quantum computing SaaS startup, is pleased to announce the release of Covalent, a open-source workflow orchestration platform designed specifically for quantum computing and HPC technologies. Covalent aims to make quantum and high-performance computing resources more accessible to practitioners and developers, including machine learning engineers and data scientists.

“Covalent started as an internal tool for our quantum algorithm research team,” says Agnostiq’s head of R&D, Santosh Kumar Radha. “It was a tool designed to give my team the ability to prototype, compute, and analyze large-scale, repeatable experiments from the comfort of our laptops. We are very happy to share Covalent with the wider community,” he added.

Fueled by the growing popularity of this technology, the global quantum computing market is expected to reach $5 billion by 2028. Quantum computing has the ability to accelerate computations in the years to come, which is expected to accelerate innovations across many industry verticals. But, it remains largely inaccessible to the enterprise, mainly due to the newness of the technology and the high level of expertise required to build applications. Agnostiq is building a suite of tools to lower the barriers to entry for developers and businesses in the world of quantum computing.

“Covalent encourages users to break down and reuse components in scientific applications. This modularity allows users to focus on designing the code while abstracting away the details of how and where to execute it. As a result, users can more easily integrate a variety of classical and quantum hardware backends into their software,” says William Cunninghamhead of software engineering at Agnostiq.

Covalent solves the following challenges associated with these advanced computing technologies:

1. Breaks down workflows into modular Python components, allowing users to easily reproduce repetitive code and avoid costly reruns; important in a high-performance computing/quantum environment, as running experiments on these devices is extremely expensive;
2. Serves as a single entry point for quantum processors, CPUs, GPUs, and quantum-inspired hardware, with no additional configuration required; and
3. Includes an intelligent task scheduler that automatically selects the best hardware resource for a given task based on a mix of predefined and user-defined constraints.

“Covalent open source is an important part of Agnostiq’s mission to democratize access to the world’s most advanced computing technologies, such as quantum computers,” says Oktay Goktas, CEO of Agnostiq. “We have an aggressive roadmap to make Covalent a standard development tool for computationally heavy tasks that require advanced computing infrastructure such as quantum and HPC.”

The company had previously obtained $2 million in seed funding, led by Differential companieswith follow-up participation from Scout companies, Increase CV, Tensility Venture Partnersand Green Egg Ventures.

About Agnostiq Inc.

Agnostiq is a fast growing startup based in Toronto and develops software tools and applications for advanced computing resources, with the goal of making these technologies more accessible to developers and enterprise customers. Agnostiq is an interdisciplinary team of physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians supported by leading investors in New York and Silicon Valley. Learn more about www.agnostiq.ai.

Source: Agnostic