18 research outputs found
Programming a Gate-based Quantum Computer: a Comparative Analysis of the Software Development Kits for Circuit Design Automation
openThe rapid development of gate-based Quantum Computers has opened new possibilities for solving complex computational problems.
However, programming these quantum systems has to deal with new challenges due to the fundamental differences between classical and Quantum Computing paradigms.
This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Software Development Kits (SDKs) conceived for circuit design automation in gate-based quantum computers.
The objective of this research is to evaluate and compare the capabilities, features, and usability of existing SDKs focusing on the functionalities such as
allowing users to define quantum circuits, apply gate operations, and simulate their behaviour.
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Apart from the widely adopted frameworks such as Qiskit, TKET, and Cirq, the analysis also includes the recently developed SDK from the University of Padua: Quantum Matcha Tea.
The comparative analysis is conducted through a series of experiments and benchmarks performed on each SDK having as central points the programming interfaces usability, the documentation completeness, and the availability of support provided by the vendor or the related developer community.
Another goal of this work is to explore the efficiency and flexibility of the various SDKs in handling common quantum computing tasks, such as quantum circuit design, gate operation, and circuit execution both on simulators and real quantum hardware.
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The ambition of this comparative analysis is to give useful insights to researchers, developers, and practitioners in order to identify strengths and weaknesses of different SDKs depending on the specific requirements of the algorithms that need to be implemented.
Additionally, the research aims to contribute to the advancement of SDKs by identifying areas of improvement and potential future directions in the development of quantum programming tools.The rapid development of gate-based Quantum Computers has opened new possibilities for solving complex computational problems.
However, programming these quantum systems has to deal with new challenges due to the fundamental differences between classical and Quantum Computing paradigms.
This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Software Development Kits (SDKs) conceived for circuit design automation in gate-based quantum computers.
The objective of this research is to evaluate and compare the capabilities, features, and usability of existing SDKs focusing on the functionalities such as
allowing users to define quantum circuits, apply gate operations, and simulate their behaviour.
Â
Apart from the widely adopted frameworks such as Qiskit, TKET, and Cirq, the analysis also includes the recently developed SDK from the University of Padua: Quantum Matcha Tea.
The comparative analysis is conducted through a series of experiments and benchmarks performed on each SDK having as central points the programming interfaces usability, the documentation completeness, and the availability of support provided by the vendor or the related developer community.
Another goal of this work is to explore the efficiency and flexibility of the various SDKs in handling common quantum computing tasks, such as quantum circuit design, gate operation, and circuit execution both on simulators and real quantum hardware.
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The ambition of this comparative analysis is to give useful insights to researchers, developers, and practitioners in order to identify strengths and weaknesses of different SDKs depending on the specific requirements of the algorithms that need to be implemented.
Additionally, the research aims to contribute to the advancement of SDKs by identifying areas of improvement and potential future directions in the development of quantum programming tools
Discrete Event Simulations
Considered by many authors as a technique for modelling stochastic, dynamic and discretely evolving systems, this technique has gained widespread acceptance among the practitioners who want to represent and improve complex systems. Since DES is a technique applied in incredibly different areas, this book reflects many different points of view about DES, thus, all authors describe how it is understood and applied within their context of work, providing an extensive understanding of what DES is. It can be said that the name of the book itself reflects the plurality that these points of view represent. The book embraces a number of topics covering theory, methods and applications to a wide range of sectors and problem areas that have been categorised into five groups. As well as the previously explained variety of points of view concerning DES, there is one additional thing to remark about this book: its richness when talking about actual data or actual data based analysis. When most academic areas are lacking application cases, roughly the half part of the chapters included in this book deal with actual problems or at least are based on actual data. Thus, the editor firmly believes that this book will be interesting for both beginners and practitioners in the area of DES
Compilation Techniques for High-Performance Embedded Systems with Multiple Processors
Institute for Computing Systems ArchitectureDespite the progress made in developing more advanced compilers for embedded systems,
programming of embedded high-performance computing systems based on Digital
Signal Processors (DSPs) is still a highly skilled manual task. This is true for
single-processor systems, and even more for embedded systems based on multiple
DSPs. Compilers often fail to optimise existing DSP codes written in C due to the
employed programming style. Parallelisation is hampered by the complex multiple address
space memory architecture, which can be found in most commercial multi-DSP
configurations.
This thesis develops an integrated optimisation and parallelisation strategy that can
deal with low-level C codes and produces optimised parallel code for a homogeneous
multi-DSP architecture with distributed physical memory and multiple logical address
spaces. In a first step, low-level programming idioms are identified and recovered. This
enables the application of high-level code and data transformations well-known in the
field of scientific computing. Iterative feedback-driven search for âgoodâ transformation
sequences is being investigated. A novel approach to parallelisation based on a
unified data and loop transformation framework is presented and evaluated. Performance
optimisation is achieved through exploitation of data locality on the one hand,
and utilisation of DSP-specific architectural features such as Direct Memory Access
(DMA) transfers on the other hand.
The proposed methodology is evaluated against two benchmark suites (DSPstone
& UTDSP) and four different high-performance DSPs, one of which is part of a commercial
four processor multi-DSP board also used for evaluation. Experiments confirm
the effectiveness of the program recovery techniques as enablers of high-level transformations
and automatic parallelisation. Source-to-source transformations of DSP
codes yield an average speedup of 2.21 across four different DSP architectures. The
parallelisation scheme is â in conjunction with a set of locality optimisations â able to
produce linear and even super-linear speedups on a number of relevant DSP kernels
and applications
Quantum Simulation for High Energy Physics
It is for the first time that Quantum Simulation for High Energy Physics
(HEP) is studied in the U.S. decadal particle-physics community planning, and
in fact until recently, this was not considered a mainstream topic in the
community. This fact speaks of a remarkable rate of growth of this subfield
over the past few years, stimulated by the impressive advancements in Quantum
Information Sciences (QIS) and associated technologies over the past decade,
and the significant investment in this area by the government and private
sectors in the U.S. and other countries. High-energy physicists have quickly
identified problems of importance to our understanding of nature at the most
fundamental level, from tiniest distances to cosmological extents, that are
intractable with classical computers but may benefit from quantum advantage.
They have initiated, and continue to carry out, a vigorous program in theory,
algorithm, and hardware co-design for simulations of relevance to the HEP
mission. This community whitepaper is an attempt to bring this exciting and yet
challenging area of research to the spotlight, and to elaborate on what the
promises, requirements, challenges, and potential solutions are over the next
decade and beyond.Comment: This is a whitepaper prepared for the topical groups CompF6 (Quantum
computing), TF05 (Lattice Gauge Theory), and TF10 (Quantum Information
Science) within the Computational Frontier and Theory Frontier of the U.S.
Community Study on the Future of Particle Physics (Snowmass 2021). 103 pages
and 1 figur
Timing model derivation : static analysis of hardware description languages
Safety-critical hard real-time systems are subject to strict timing constraints. In order to derive guarantees on the timing behavior, the worst-case execution time (WCET) of each task comprising the system has to be known. The aiT tool has been developed for computing safe upper bounds on the WCET of a task. Its computation is mainly based on abstract interpretation of timing models of the processor and its periphery. These models are currently hand-crafted by human experts, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Modern processors are automatically synthesized from formal hardware specifications. Besides the processorâs functional behavior, also timing aspects are included in these descriptions. A methodology to derive sound timing models using hardware specifications is described within this thesis. To ease the process of timing model derivation, the methodology is embedded into a sound framework. A key part of this framework are static analyses on hardware specifications. This thesis presents an analysis framework that is build on the theory of abstract interpretation allowing use of classical program analyses on hardware description languages. Its suitability to automate parts of the derivation methodology is shown by different analyses. Practical experiments demonstrate the applicability of the approach to derive timing models. Also the soundness of the analyses and the analysesâ results is proved.Sicherheitskritische Echtzeitsysteme unterliegen strikten Zeitanforderungen. Um ihr Zeitverhalten zu garantieren mĂŒssen die AusfĂŒhrungszeiten der einzelnen Programme, die das System bilden, bekannt sein. Um sichere obere Schranken fĂŒr die AusfĂŒhrungszeit von Programmen zu berechnen wurde aiT entwickelt. Die Berechnung basiert auf abstrakter Interpretation von Zeitmodellen des Prozessors und seiner Peripherie. Diese Modelle werden hĂ€ndisch in einem zeitaufwendigen und fehleranfĂ€lligen Prozess von Experten entwickelt. Moderne Prozessoren werden automatisch aus formalen Spezifikationen erzeugt. Neben dem funktionalen Verhalten beschreiben diese auch das Zeitverhalten des Prozessors. In dieser Arbeit wird eine Methodik zur sicheren Ableitung von Zeitmodellen aus der Hardwarespezifikation beschrieben. Um den Ableitungsprozess zu vereinfachen ist diese Methodik in eine automatisierte Umgebung eingebettet. Ein Hauptbestandteil dieses Systems sind statische Analysen auf Hardwarebeschreibungen. Diese Arbeit stellt eine Analyse-Umgebung vor, die auf der Theorie der abstrakten Interpretation aufbaut und den Einsatz von klassischen Programmanalysen auf Hardwarebeschreibungssprachen erlaubt. Die Eignung des Systems, Teile der Ableitungsmethodik zu automatisieren, wird anhand einiger Analysen gezeigt. Experimentelle Ergebnisse zeigen die Anwendbarkeit der Methodik zur Ableitung von Zeitmodellen. Die Korrektheit der Analysen und der Analyse-Ergebnisse wird ebenfalls bewiesen
Software and hardware implementation techniques for digital communications-related algorithms
There are essentially three areas addressed in the body of this thesis. (a) The first is a theoretical investigation into the design and development of a practically realizable
implementation of a maximum-likelihood detection process to deal with digital data transmission over
HF radio links. These links exhibit multipath properties with delay spreads that can easily extend over 12
to 15 milliseconds. The project was sponsored by the Ministry of Defence through the auspices of the Science
and Engineering Research Council. The primary objective was to transmit voice band data at a minimum
rate of 2.4 kb/s continuously for long periods of time during the day or night. Computer simulation
models of HF propagation channels were created to simulate atmospheric and multipath effects of transmission
from London to Washington DC, Ankara, and as far as Melbourne, Australia. Investigations into
HF channel estimation are not the subject of this thesis. The detection process assumed accurate knowledge
of the channel. [Continues.
Cybernetic automata: An approach for the realization of economical cognition for multi-robot systems
The multi-agent robotics paradigm has attracted much attention due to the
variety of pertinent applications that are well-served by the use of a multiplicity of
agents (including space robotics, search and rescue, and mobile sensor networks). The
use of this paradigm for most applications, however, demands economical, lightweight
agent designs for reasons of longer operational life, lower economic cost, faster and
easily-verified designs, etc.
An important contributing factor to an agentâs cost is its control architecture.
Due to the emergence of novel implementation technologies carrying the promise of
economical implementation, we consider the development of a technology-independent
specification for computational machinery. To that end, the use of cybernetics toolsets
(control and dynamical systems theory) is appropriate, enabling a principled specifi-
cation of robotic control architectures in mathematical terms that could be mapped
directly to diverse implementation substrates.
This dissertation, hence, addresses the problem of developing a technologyindependent
specification for lightweight control architectures to enable robotic agents
to serve in a multi-agent scheme. We present the principled design of static and dynamical
regulators that elicit useful behaviors, and integrate these within an overall
architecture for both single and multi-agent control. Since the use of control theory
can be limited in unstructured environments, a major focus of the work is on the engineering of emergent behavior.
The proposed scheme is highly decentralized, requiring only local sensing and
no inter-agent communication. Beyond several simulation-based studies, we provide
experimental results for a two-agent system, based on a custom implementation employing
field-programmable gate arrays
Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022
Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022 is a creative-commons ebook that
provides a unique 360 degrees overview of quantum technologies from science and
technology to geopolitical and societal issues. It covers quantum physics
history, quantum physics 101, gate-based quantum computing, quantum computing
engineering (including quantum error corrections and quantum computing
energetics), quantum computing hardware (all qubit types, including quantum
annealing and quantum simulation paradigms, history, science, research,
implementation and vendors), quantum enabling technologies (cryogenics, control
electronics, photonics, components fabs, raw materials), quantum computing
algorithms, software development tools and use cases, unconventional computing
(potential alternatives to quantum and classical computing), quantum
telecommunications and cryptography, quantum sensing, quantum technologies
around the world, quantum technologies societal impact and even quantum fake
sciences. The main audience are computer science engineers, developers and IT
specialists as well as quantum scientists and students who want to acquire a
global view of how quantum technologies work, and particularly quantum
computing. This version is an extensive update to the 2021 edition published in
October 2021.Comment: 1132 pages, 920 figures, Letter forma