Quantum Symbolic Execution

With advances in quantum computing, researchers can now write and run many quantum programs. However, there is still a lack of effective methods for debugging quantum programs. In this paper, quantum symbolic execution (QSE) is proposed to generate test cases, which helps to finding bugs in quantum programs. The main idea of quantum symbolic execution is to find the suitable test cases from all possible ones (i.e. test case space). It is different from the way of classical symbol execution, which gets test cases by calculating instead of searching. QSE utilizes quantum superposition and parallelism to store the test case space with only a few qubits. According to the conditional statements in the debugged program, the test case space is continuously divided into subsets, subsubsets and so on. Elements in the same subset are suitable test cases that can test the corresponding branch in the code to be tested. QSE not only provides a possible way to debug quantum programs, but also avoids the difficult problem of solving constraints in classical symbolic execution

EXTRA: Towards the exploitation of eXascale technology for reconfigurable architectures

© 2016 IEEE. To handle the stringent performance requirements of future exascale-class applications, High Performance Computing (HPC) systems need ultra-efficient heterogeneous compute nodes. To reduce power and increase performance, such compute nodes will require hardware accelerators with a high degree of specialization. Ideally, dynamic reconfiguration will be an intrinsic feature, so that specific HPC application features can be optimally accelerated, even if they regularly change over time. In the EXTRA project, we create a new and flexible exploration platform for developing reconfigurable architectures, design tools and HPC applications with run-time reconfiguration built-in as a core fundamental feature instead of an add-on. EXTRA covers the entire stack from architecture up to the application, focusing on the fundamental building blocks for run-time reconfigurable exascale HPC systems: new chip architectures with very low reconfiguration overhead, new tools that truly take reconfiguration as a central design concept, and applications that are tuned to maximally benefit from the proposed run-time reconfiguration techniques. Ultimately, this open platform will improve Europe's competitive advantage and leadership in the field

Is Your Quantum Program Bug-Free?

Quantum computers are becoming more mainstream. As more programmers are starting to look at writing quantum programs, they face an inevitable task of debugging their code. How should the programs for quantum computers be debugged? In this paper, we discuss existing debugging tactics, used in developing programs for classic computers, and show which ones can be readily adopted. We also highlight quantum-computer-specific debugging issues and list novel techniques that are needed to address these issues. The practitioners can readily apply some of these tactics to their process of writing quantum programs, while researchers can learn about opportunities for future work.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results, 202

Projection-based runtime assertions for testing and debugging Quantum programs

© 2020 Owner/Author. In this paper, we propose Proq, a runtime assertion scheme for testing and debugging quantum programs on a quantum computer. The predicates in Proq are represented by projections (or equivalently, closed subspaces of the state space), following Birkhoff-von Neumann quantum logic. The satisfaction of a projection by a quantum state can be directly checked upon a small number of projective measurements rather than a large number of repeated executions. On the theory side, we rigorously prove that checking projection-based assertions can help locate bugs or statistically assure that the semantic function of the tested program is close to what we expect, for both exact and approximate quantum programs. On the practice side, we consider hardware constraints and introduce several techniques to transform the assertions, making them directly executable on the measurement-restricted quantum computers. We also propose to achieve simplified assertion implementation using local projection technique with soundness guaranteed. We compare Proq with existing quantum program assertions and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Proq by its applications to assert two sophisticated quantum algorithms, the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd algorithm and Shor's algorithm