theodore morgan
quantum application engineer at qblox. software engineer before that. amsterdam.
who
I'm Theo. I studied computer science and started out in software engineering, doing product and backend work across several companies. Now I work on quantum computing at Qblox.
The change wasn't sudden. I worked through DelftX's QTM2x and QTM3x in the evenings first, partly to see whether the interest would survive actual study. It did. I moved across because I think quantum computing is going to be a real technology, and because the problems are the kind I want to spend my time on.
what I do
Qblox makes the control hardware that sits between a quantum processor and the people using it: instruments that generate the pulses a qubit responds to, digitise what comes back, and hold the timing the physics needs. On top of that runs a stack of software that turns an experiment written in Python into synchronised signals across many channels. I work on the middleware in that stack -- the layer the instruments and the user-facing software both build on.
I came into this from software, not physics, and it shows in what I pay attention to. Of the things people expect quantum computers to eventually do well, simulating quantum systems -- molecules, materials, the physics that's hard to reach classically -- is the case I find most convincing, and it's where most of my reading goes. What draws me to it is interference as the mechanism behind any speedup, rather than the many-worlds framing that usually comes attached.
work
[*] control cluster performance
The first project I worked on at Qblox. We benchmarked a real workload and found the time going to sequence compilation, network overhead during upload, and communication between modules. Closing it came down to a handful of features -- double buffering, bulk communication with the modules, partial acquisition -- which I worked out with the embedded team, who built them. The same workload came out 7.9× faster.
[*] gen-2 middleware
What I'm working on now: the middleware for Qblox's second-generation hardware. The hard part is scaling to hundreds of modules while keeping the interface people already know.
elsewhere
- [email protected]
- github
- github.com/xy3
- linkedin.com/in/xy3
- projects
- 1t.ie -- small things I build and host