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The Quantum Experience team at IBM has started to open source their quantum software QISKit, writes quantum computing and information scientist Jay Gambetta. QISKit allows developers to explore IBM cloud-enabled quantum processor using Python.

IBM QISKit includes three main components:

The QISKit client can also be used in a Jupyter Notebook:

A Python QISKit SDK, which includes several tools that IBM Q engineers have provided for illustrative purposes. In particular, the SDK shows how you can compose multiple jobs for complex experiments such as state tomography, randomized benchmarking, and entanglement tests.

The OPENQASM specification, which details the Open Quantum Assembly Language 2.0 and is a fundamental reading if you want to understand both the quantum computation model brought forward by IBM and the syntax used to express quantum experiments.

In IBMs OPENAQSM model, a quantum computation is carried through in four steps:

IBM Quantum Experience aims to make it possible to connect to IBMs quantum computer via IBMs cloud and to experiment with or integrate quantum capability into software programs. Quantum computers differ from classical transistor-based computers where there are only two allowed states due to the use of quantum bits, which can be the superposition of multiple states. Quantum computation is touted to be able to efficiently solve problems which are not approachable using ordinary computers, in the field of integer factorization (cryptography), for the simulation of quantum physical processes, the approximation of Jones polynomials, solving Pells equation, and others. For some of those problems, quantum computers offer a polynomial speedup over their classical counterparts, which also implies that currently intractable (NP) problems will not convert into tractable problems thanks to quantum computing, only more approachable.

The rest is here:
IBM QISKit Aims to Enable Cloud-basaed Quantum Computation - InfoQ.com