circuit-based approach to ultra-cold atom quantum simulators would alleviate points 2) and 3) as we could agree on the quantum circuit, given the hardware-specific operations, and run it on the experiment. Integrating the system with a software stack like PennyLane would additionally allow to address and run the experiment on a higher level and substantially lower the barrier of entry for users outside of the cold-atom and quantum physics community.  
These points motivated our research group to have a look how our experimental hardware, which is controlled by the Labscript Suite, can be integrated into PennyLane to run quantum circuits on ultra-cold atom devices.  Our group is part of SynQS, working on two ultra-cold atom experiments, the NaLi and SoPa (named after the two atomic species used in the lab).

Why use ultra-cold atoms as a quantum information platform ?

For ultra-cold atoms, the processing unit is not a qubit and as such, the natural operations are not generally the commonly used and widely known qubit operations such as \(X,Y,Z\) rotations, Hadamard \(H\) gates, entangling \(CNOT \) or \(XX\) gates with oberservables like \(\sigma^z\) expectations. Instead, our NaLi experiment implements a \(X(\theta)\) rotation on a long spin of many bosons on one optical lattice site. Additionally, the system naturally evolves under a many-body Hamiltonian \(H_{mb}\), coupling the the atomic species.
What is the qubit equivalent of those operations? The relation is pretty complex - and that is the nice thing! Cold atoms are different. Given their success in the quantum simulation of many-body problems, they could make for an exciting quantum information processor that is complementary to universal devices. So as a general rule of thumb, it could be argued that cold atom machines often give up some control over individual particles, leading to much bigger systems. Additionally, because we work with a large number of atoms, we can measure obtain rather precise estimates of expectation values with a single state preparation and one measurement

A concrete example from our group