2,479 research outputs found
Programming Quantum Computers Using Design Automation
Recent developments in quantum hardware indicate that systems featuring more
than 50 physical qubits are within reach. At this scale, classical simulation
will no longer be feasible and there is a possibility that such quantum devices
may outperform even classical supercomputers at certain tasks. With the rapid
growth of qubit numbers and coherence times comes the increasingly difficult
challenge of quantum program compilation. This entails the translation of a
high-level description of a quantum algorithm to hardware-specific low-level
operations which can be carried out by the quantum device. Some parts of the
calculation may still be performed manually due to the lack of efficient
methods. This, in turn, may lead to a design gap, which will prevent the
programming of a quantum computer. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in
fully-automatic quantum compilation. We motivate directions for future research
to tackle these challenges. Yet, with the algorithms and approaches that exist
today, we demonstrate how to automatically perform the quantum programming flow
from algorithm to a physical quantum computer for a simple algorithmic
benchmark, namely the hidden shift problem. We present and use two tool flows
which invoke RevKit. One which is based on ProjectQ and which targets the IBM
Quantum Experience or a local simulator, and one which is based on Microsoft's
quantum programming language Q.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures. To appear in: Proceedings of Design, Automation
and Test in Europe (DATE 2018
Toward an architecture for quantum programming
It is becoming increasingly clear that, if a useful device for quantum
computation will ever be built, it will be embodied by a classical computing
machine with control over a truly quantum subsystem, this apparatus performing
a mixture of classical and quantum computation.
This paper investigates a possible approach to the problem of programming
such machines: a template high level quantum language is presented which
complements a generic general purpose classical language with a set of quantum
primitives. The underlying scheme involves a run-time environment which
calculates the byte-code for the quantum operations and pipes it to a quantum
device controller or to a simulator.
This language can compactly express existing quantum algorithms and reduce
them to sequences of elementary operations; it also easily lends itself to
automatic, hardware independent, circuit simplification. A publicly available
preliminary implementation of the proposed ideas has been realized using the
C++ language.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, A4paper. Final version accepted by EJPD ("swap"
replaced by "invert" for Qops). Preliminary implementation available at:
http://sra.itc.it/people/serafini/quantum-computing/qlang.htm
- …