Setup

Students can follow along with the course notebooks either on their laptop or via notebooks.csc.fi.

Locally with your laptop

All of the course contents can be followed along locally on your laptop. Each tutorial will provide installation instructions.

If you already have a preferred way to manage Python versions and libraries, you can stick to that. If not, we recommend that you install Python3 and all libraries using miniconda a free minimal installer for the package, dependency and environment manager for conda.

Please follow the installation instructions on https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html to install Miniconda3.

Make sure that both Python and conda are correctly installed:

$ python --version
$ # should give something like Python 3.10.13
$ conda --version
$ # should give something like conda 23.7.2

A requirements.txt file is provided which contains all of the python packages to install a local software environment on your computer. Using this a conda environment can be created using the command:

$ conda create --name qas2023 -y python=3.10 pip

Which creates a new conda environment with Python 3.10 and pip. You can then activate it and install the python packages:

$ conda activate qas2023
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

You can download the requirements.txt here.

Notebooks.csc.fi

CSC’s notebooks platform provides a preconfigured python environment and jupyter-lab server for running all of the jupyter notebooks shown in this course. No setup is required to run the notebooks. User documentation on the notebooks platform can be found here.

Note

For running any of the tutorials on Helmi, Finland’s 5-qubit quantum computer, the notebooks.csc.fi platform is required to be used.

Students and instructors can log in with either their CSC account or HAKA federated account if they have one, otherwise a training account will be provided before the start of the Quantum Autumn School. A join code will be given for the Quantum Autumn School which can be used once logged in by clicking “Join workspace” in the top right corner. Once you have joined the workspace, you will have access to the Quantum Autumn School workspace, and clicking the “Start a session” button will launch your jupyter notebooks server.

QAS2023 application The Quantum Autumn School application. It can be launched by clicking the launch button.

QAS2023 notebooks page Once launched the application screen should look like this. The notebooks folder contains notebooks from the Github page. To view the rest of the course contents view the qas2023 folder.

Data persistance

As described in CSC’s documentation, some notebooks and data are persisted across the days of the School. To save your progress and modifications made to the notebooks during the tutorials it is recommended to copy your notebooks to the my-work directory. If instructors wish to share notebooks and data with the rest of the course files can be added to the shared directory. Changes made to files in directories other than my-work for students and shared for instructors will not persist across sessions.