QASM fills a gap in the software ecosystem for D-Wave's adiabatic quantum computers by shielding the programmer from having to know system-specific hardware details while still enabling programs to be expressed at a fairly low level of abstraction. It is therefore analogous to a conventional macro assembler and can be used in much the same way: as a target either for programmers who want a great deal of control over the hardware or for compilers that implement higher-level languages.
Despite having the same name, Los Alamos's QASM has nothing to do with MIT's QASM, which is used to describe quantum circuits (a different model of quantum computation from what the D-Wave uses).
QASM is written in Python and uses Setuptools for installation. Use
python setup.py installto install in the default location and
python setup.py install --prefix=/my/install/directoryto install elsewhere.
Documentation for QASM can be found on the QASM wiki.
QASM is provided under a BSD-ish license with a "modifications must be indicated" clause. See the LICENSE file for the full text.
This package is part of the Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing suite, known internally as LA-CC-16-032.
Scott Pakin, [email protected]