Current proposals for quantum compilers require the synthesis and optimization of linear reversible circuits and among them CNOT circuits. Since these circuits represent a significant part of the cost of running an entire quantum circuit, we aim at reducing their size. In this paper we present a new algorithm for the synthesis of CNOT circuits based on the solution of the syndrome decoding problem. Our method addresses the case of ideal hardware with an all-to-all qubit connectivity and the case of near-term quantum devices with restricted connectivity. For both cases, we present benchmarks showing that our algorithm outperforms existing algorithms.
While mapping a quantum circuit to the physical layer one has to consider the numerous constraints imposed by the underlying hardware architecture. Connectivity of the physical qubits is one such constraint that restricts two-qubit operations, such as CNOT, to "connected" qubits. SWAP gates can be used to place the logical qubits on admissible physical qubits, but they entail a significant increase in CNOT-count. In this paper we consider the problem of reducing the CNOT-count in Clifford+T circuits on connectivity constrained architectures, like noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computi…
We present a framework for the synthesis of phase polynomials that addresses both cases of full connectivity and partial connectivity for NISQ architectures. In most cases, our algorithms generate circuits with lower CNOT count and CNOT depth than the state of the art or have a significantly smaller running time for similar performances. We also provide methods that can be applied to our algorithms in order to trade an increase in the CNOT count for a decrease in execution time, thereby filling the gap between our algorithms and faster ones.
In the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ), executing quantum algorithms on actual quantum devices faces unique challenges. One such challenge is that quantum devices in this era have restricted connectivity: quantum gates are allowed to act only on specific pairs of physical qubits. For this reason, a quantum circuit needs to go through a compiling process called qubit routing before it can be executed on a quantum computer. In this study, we propose a CNOT synthesis method called the token reduction method to solve this problem. The token reduction method works for all quantum com…
Quantum computers in practice today require strict memory constraints, where 2-qubit operations can only be performed between the qubits closest to each other in a graph structure. So a quantum circuit must undergo a transformation to the graph before it can be implemented. In this paper, we study the optimization of the CNOT circuits on some noisy intermediate-scale quantum(NISQ) devices. Compared with previous works, we decompose it into two sub-problems: optimization with a given initial qubit distribution and optimization without limitations of initial qubit distribution. We find that most…
Noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers are expected to execute quantum circuits of up to a few hundred qubits. The circuits have to conform to NISQ architectural constraints regarding qubit allocation and the execution of multi-qubit gates. Quantum circuit compilation (QCC) takes a nonconforming circuit and outputs a compatible circuit. Can classical optimisation methods be used for QCC? Compilation is a known combinatorial problem shown to be solvable by two types of operations: 1) qubit allocation, and 2) gate scheduling. We show informally that the two operations form a discrete…
The progress in developing quantum hardware with functional quantum processors integrating tens of noisy qubits, together with the availability of near-term quantum algorithms has led to the release of the first quantum computers. These quantum computing systems already integrate different software and hardware components of the so-called "full-stack", bridging quantum applications to quantum devices. In this paper, we will provide an overview on current full-stack quantum computing systems. We will emphasize the need for tight co-design among adjacent layers as well as vertical cross-layer de…
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) machines are not fault-tolerant, operate few qubits (currently, less than hundred), but are capable of executing interesting computations. Above the quantum supremacy threshold (approx. 60 qubits), NISQ machines are expected to be more powerful than existing classical computers. One of the most stringent problems is that computations (expressed as quantum circuits) have to be adapted (compiled) to the NISQ hardware, because the hardware does not support arbitrary interactions between the qubits. This procedure introduces additional gates (e.g. SWAP gates…
A CNOT circuit is the key gadget for entangling qubits in quantum computing systems. However, the qubit connectivity of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices is constrained by their {limited connectivity architecture}. To improve the performance of CNOT circuits on NISQ devices, we investigate the optimization of the size/depth of CNOT circuits under the limited connectivity architecture. We present a method that can optimize the size of any $n$-qubit CNOT circuit $O\left(\frac{n^2}{\log δ}\right)$ on any connected graph with minimum degree $δ$, and prove this bound is optimal for th…
It is imperative to compile quantum circuits for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices because of the limited connectivity of physical qubits and the high error rates of gate operations. One of the most critical steps in quantum circuit compilation is qubit routing, an NP-Hard problem that involves placing and moving logical qubits to minimize compilation overhead. In this study, we propose ISing mAchine Assisted Quantum compiler (ISAAQ) to perform qubit routing with Ising machines, which can efficiently solve Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems. ISAAQ accurat…
Modern NISQ devices are subject to a variety of biases and sources of noise that degrade the solution quality of computations carried out on these devices. A natural question that arises in the NISQ era, is how fairly do these devices sample ground state solutions. To this end, we run five fair sampling problems (each with at least three ground state solutions) that are based both on quantum annealing and on the Grover Mixer-QAOA algorithm for gate-based NISQ hardware. In particular, we use seven IBM~Q devices, the Aspen-9 Rigetti device, the IonQ device, and three D-Wave quantum annealers. Fo…
One of the key challenges in current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers is to control a quantum system with high-fidelity quantum gates. There are many reasons a quantum gate can go wrong -- for superconducting transmon qubits in particular, one major source of gate error is the unwanted crosstalk between neighboring qubits due to a phenomenon called frequency crowding. We motivate a systematic approach for understanding and mitigating the crosstalk noise when executing near-term quantum programs on superconducting NISQ computers. We present a general software solution to allevi…
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices fail to produce outputs with sufficient fidelity for deep circuits with many gates today. Such devices suffer from read-out, multi-qubit gate and crosstalk noise combined with short decoherence times limiting circuit depth. This work develops a methodology to generate shorter circuits with fewer multi-qubit gates whose unitary transformations approximate the original reference one. It explores the benefit of such generated approximations under NISQ devices. Experimental results with Grover's algorithm, multiple-control Toffoli gates, and the Tran…
As superconducting qubits continue to advance technologically, the realization of quantum algorithms from theoretical abstraction to physical implementation requires knowledge of both quantum circuit construction as well as hardware limitations. In this study we present results from experiments run on IBM's 20-qubit `Poughkeepsie' architecture, with the goal of demonstrating various qubit qualities and challenges that arise in designing quantum algorithms. These include experimentally measuring $T_1$ and $T_2$ coherence times, gate fidelities, sequential CNOT gates, techniques for handling anc…
Routing plays an important role in programming noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, where limited connectivity in the register is overcome by swapping quantum information between locations. However, routing a quantum state using noisy gates introduces non-trivial noise dynamics, and deciding on an optimal route to minimize accumulated error requires estimates of the expected state fidelity. Here we validate a model for state-dependent routing dynamics in a NISQ processor based on correlated binary noise. We develop a composable, state-dependent noise model for CNOT and SWAP operat…
Efficient compilation of quantum algorithms is vital in the era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. While multiple open-source quantum compilation and circuit optimization frameworks are available, e.g. IBM Qiskit, CQC Tket, Google Cirq, Rigetti Quilc, PyZX, their relative performance is not always clear to a quantum programmer. The growth of complexity and diversity of quantum circuit compilation algorithms creates a demand for a dedicated tool for cross-benchmarking and profiling of inner workflow of the quantum compilation stack. We present an open-source software package, A…
We provide evidence that commonly held intuitions when designing quantum circuits can be misleading. In particular we show that: a) reducing the T-count can increase the total depth; b) it may be beneficial to trade CNOTs for measurements in NISQ circuits; c) measurement-based uncomputation of relative phase Toffoli ancillae can make up to 30\% of a circuit's depth; d) area and volume cost metrics can misreport the resource analysis. Our findings assume that qubits are and will remain a very scarce resource. The results are applicable for both NISQ and QECC protected circuits. Our method uses …
We provide an efficient algorithm to compile quantum circuits for fault-tolerant execution. We target surface codes, which form a 2D grid of logical qubits with nearest-neighbor logical operations. Embedding an input circuit's qubits in surface codes can result in long-range two-qubit operations across the grid. We show how to prepare many long-range Bell pairs on qubits connected by edge-disjoint paths of ancillas in constant depth that can be used to perform these long-range operations. This forms one core part of our Edge-Disjoint Paths Compilation (EDPC) algorithm, by easily performing man…
The Poisson equation has many applications across the broad areas of science and engineering. Most quantum algorithms for the Poisson solver presented so far, either suffer from lack of accuracy and/or are limited to very small sizes of the problem, and thus have no practical usage. Here we present an advanced quantum algorithm for solving the Poisson equation with high accuracy and dynamically tunable problem size. After converting the Poisson equation to the linear systems through the finite difference method, we adopt the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm as the basic framework. Particu…
Quantum circuit compilation with constant overhead
Google Quantum AI（谷歌量子人工智能）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics（滑铁卢大学量子计算研究所与佩里尔理论物理研究所）
Noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) systems are expected to have a few hundred qubits, minimal or no error correction, limited connectivity and limits on the number of gates that can be performed within the short coherence window of the machine. The past decade's research on quantum programming languages and compilers is directed towards large systems with thousands of qubits. For near term quantum systems, it is crucial to design tool flows which make efficient use of the hardware resources without sacrificing the ease and portability of a high-level programming environment. In this pape…
QROB: Quantifying Realization Overhead in Quantum Compilation via Reverse Construction
Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences（北京量子信息科学研究院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院物理研究所）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）
Error mitigation is one of the key challenges in realising the full potential of quantum cryptographic protocols. Consequently, there is a lot of interest in adapting techniques from quantum error correction (QEC) to improve the robustness of quantum cryptographic protocols. In this work, we benchmark the performance of different QKD protocols on noisy quantum devices, with and without error correction. We obtain the secure key rates of BB84, B92 and BBM92 QKD protocols over a quantum channel that is subject to amplitude-damping noise. We demonstrate, theoretically and via implementations on t…
Simulating time evolution of quantum systems is one of the most promising applications of quantum computing and also appears as a subroutine in many applications such as Green's function methods. In the current era of NISQ machines we assess the state of algorithms for simulating time dynamics with limited resources. We propose the Jaynes-Cummings model and extensions to it as useful toy models to investigate time evolution algorithms on near-term quantum computers. Using these simple models, direct Trotterisation of the time evolution operator produces deep circuits, requiring coherence times…
In the last decades, we have witnessed the rapid growth of Quantum Computing. In the current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, the capability of a quantum machine is limited by the decoherence time, gate fidelity and the number of Qubits. Current quantum computing applications are far from the real "quantum supremacy" due to the fragile physical Qubits, which can only be entangled for a few microseconds. Recent works use quantum optimal control to reduce the latency of quantum circuits, thereby effectively increasing quantum volume. However, the key challenge of this technique is th…
We present an algorithm for compiling arbitrary unitaries into a sequence of gates native to a quantum processor. As accurate CNOT gates are hard for the foreseeable Noisy- Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices era, our A* inspired algorithm attempts to minimize their count, while accounting for connectivity. We discuss the search strategy together with metrics to expand the solution frontier. For a workload of circuits with complexity appropriate for the NISQ era, we produce solutions well within the best upper bounds published in literature and match or exceed hand tuned implementations, as wel…
The current phase of quantum computing is in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. On NISQ devices, two-qubit gates such as CNOTs are much noisier than single-qubit gates, so it is essential to minimize their count. Quantum circuit synthesis is a process of decomposing an arbitrary unitary into a sequence of quantum gates, and can be used as an optimization tool to produce shorter circuits to improve overall circuit fidelity. However, the time-to-solution of synthesis grows exponentially with the number of qubits. As a result, synthesis is intractable for circuits on a large qubit s…
Currently available quantum computing hardware platforms have limited 2-qubit connectivity among their addressable qubits. In order to run a generic quantum algorithm on such a platform, one has to transform the initial logical quantum circuit describing the algorithm into an equivalent one that obeys the connectivity restrictions. In this work we construct a circuit synthesis scheme that takes as input the qubit connectivity graph and a quantum circuit over the gate set generated by $\{\text{CNOT},R_{Z}\}$ and outputs a circuit that respects the connectivity of the device. As a concrete appli…
Computational Complexity of Clifford Template Compilation: Are Quantum Computers Useful for Compiling Quantum Circuits?
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学大学院情报学府）；Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University（大阪大学工学研究科）；Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology, Osaka University（大阪大学量子信息与量子生物学中心）；RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing (RQC)（理化学研究所量子计算中心）
