Getting started

Hardware requirements

Operating System

The QOSST suite does not required a particular software and should work on Windows (tested), Linux (tested) and Mac (not tested).

The actual operating system requirement will come down to the hardware used for the experiment since some of them don’t have interfaces with Windows.

RAM requirements

QOSST software is not particularly improved for RAM consumptions and while qosst-alice will not create any issue, the Digital Signal Processing on Bob side will be way more demanding. The software was tested on our side on a system with 64 GB of RAM, without any issue. We believe that this value can be decreased since the DSP was also able to run on a laptop with 20 GB of RAM (with no hardware). We however advise to go no less than 20 GB of RAM and we advise to go higher to take into account the required RAM for hardware (in particular the ADC).

Python version

QOSST if officially supporting any python version 3.9 or above.

Installing the software

There are several ways of installing the software, either by using the PyPi repositories or using the source.

Installing the whole suite at once

It is possible to install all the packages of QOSST (qosst-core, qosst-hal, qosst-alice, qosst-bob and qosst-skr) with the command

pip install qosst

Warning

This method of installation is not recommended, since it is usually not useful to have qosst-alice and qosst-bob on the same system. For tests, or system with a single computer controlling both parties, we still recommend to install separately qosst-alice and qosst-bob.

Installing the required software for Alice

To install the required software for Alice you can simply run the command

pip install qosst-alice

This will automatically install qosst-core, qosst-hal and qosst-alice (along with other required dependencies).

Alternatively, you can clone the repository at https://github.com/qosst/qosst-alice and install it by source.

Installing the required software for Bob

To install the required software for Bob you can simply run the command

pip install qosst-bob

This will automatically install qosst-core, qosst-hal, qosst-skr and qosst-bob (along with other required dependencies).

Alternatively, you can clone the repository at https://github.com/qosst/qosst-bob and install it by source.

Checking the version of the software

In whatever chosen method qosst-core should be installed in your systems. This packages provide the qosst command from which the whole documentation can be found on the qosst-core documentation (link of documentation).

You can check the version by issuing the command

$ qosst info


 ██████╗  ██████╗ ███████╗███████╗████████╗
██╔═══██╗██╔═══██╗██╔════╝██╔════╝╚══██╔══╝
██║   ██║██║   ██║███████╗███████╗   ██║   
██║▄▄ ██║██║   ██║╚════██║╚════██║   ██║   
╚██████╔╝╚██████╔╝███████║███████║   ██║   
 ╚══▀▀═╝  ╚═════╝ ╚══════╝╚══════╝   ╚═╝  
                                                                                                                                         
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
python version: 3.11.9 (main, Jun 18 2024, 09:40:25) [GCC 11.4.0]

QOSST versions
qosst_core: 0.10.0
qosst_hal: 0.10.0
qosst_alice: 0.10.0
qosst_bob: 0.10.2
qosst_skr: 0.10.0
qosst_pp: Not installed

If the qosst command was not installed in the path, it also possible to run the following command:

python3 -m qosst_core.commands info

or

python3 -c "from qosst_core.infos import get_script_infos; print(get_script_infos())"

In the following we will assume that you have access to the qosst (and other) commands. If not you can replace the instructions similarly to above.

If this works and have the newest versions, you should be ready to go !