Exploiting Quantum Teleportation in Quantum Circuit Mapping

Quantum computers are constantly growing in their number of qubits, but continue to suffer from restrictions such as the limited pairs of qubits that may interact with each other. Thus far, this problem is addressed by mapping and moving qubits to suitable positions for the interaction (known as quantum circuit mapping). However, this movement requires additional gates to be incorporated into the circuit, whose number should be kept as small as possible since each gate increases the likelihood of errors and decoherence. State-of-the-art mapping methods utilize swapping and bridging to move the qubits along the static paths of the coupling map---solving this problem without exploiting all means the quantum domain has to offer. In this paper, we propose to additionally exploit quantum teleportation as a possible complementary method. Quantum teleportation conceptually allows to move the state of a qubit over arbitrary long distances with constant overhead---providing the potential of determining cheaper mappings. The potential is demonstrated by a case study on the IBM Q Tokyo architecture which already shows promising improvements. With the emergence of larger quantum computing architectures, quantum teleportation will become more effective in generating cheaper mappings.Comment: To appear in ASP-DAC 202

Verifying Results of the IBM Qiskit Quantum Circuit Compilation Flow

Realizing a conceptual quantum algorithm on an actual physical device necessitates the algorithm's quantum circuit description to undergo certain transformations in order to adhere to all constraints imposed by the hardware. In this regard, the individual high-level circuit components are first synthesized to the supported low-level gate-set of the quantum computer, before being mapped to the target's architecture---utilizing several optimizations in order to improve the compilation result. Specialized tools for this complex task exist, e.g., IBM's Qiskit, Google's Cirq, Microsoft's QDK, or Rigetti's Forest. However, to date, the circuits resulting from these tools are hardly verified, which is mainly due to the immense complexity of checking if two quantum circuits indeed realize the same functionality. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme for quantum circuit equivalence checking---specialized for verifying results of the IBM Qiskit quantum circuit compilation flow. To this end, we combine characteristics unique to quantum computing, e.g., its inherent reversibility, and certain knowledge about the compilation flow into a dedicated equivalence checking strategy. Experimental evaluations confirm that the proposed scheme allows to verify even large circuit instances with tens of thousands of operations within seconds or even less, whereas state-of-the-art techniques frequently time-out or require substantially more runtime. A corresponding open source implementation of the proposed method is publicly available at https://github.com/iic-jku/qcec.Comment: 10 pages, to be published at International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE20