Quantum Circuit Compilation: An Emerging Application for Automated Reasoning

Davide Venturelli, Minh Do, Bryan O'Gorman, Jeremy Frank, Eleanor Rieffel, Kyle E. C. Booth, Thanh Nguyen, Parvathi Narayan, Sasha Nanda

Keywords: Quantum Circuit Compilation, NISQ, Artificial Intelligence Planning, Constraint Programming, Automated Reasoning

Abstract: Quantum computing is an information processing paradigm with the potential to solve certain problems faster than any algorithm running on classical computer architectures. In the next few years, new processors will be developed that support quantum computations exceeding the simulation ability of even the largest classical computer systems. A number of academic and industrial groups are developing prototypes of such devices, also known as NISQ (Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum) processors. Much as software must be compiled to run on classical computers, quantum algorithms must be compiled to take into account the constraints of particular NISQ devices. Especially in these early prototypes, algorithm performance degrades with runtime due to noise; for this reason, minimizing the runtime of the compiled algorithm (which is represented by a ”quantum circuit”) is critical. We describe a software framework to enable an automated reasoning approach to Quantum Circuit Compilation for NISQ architectures (QCC-NISQ), and our current implementation of it as part of software suite for automated, architecture-aware, compilation for emerging quantum computers. The key components of this suite are a circuit synthesizer, a QCC solver, and a visualizer. These tools provide critical support for the continued development of practical quantum computers and research into quantum algorithms.