Using Qiskit: NISQ-ERA compilation for Qiskit

Rod Van Meter
Keio University, JP

ABSTRACT


The talk will give an overview of user activities with a particular focus on compilation for Qiskit. This task has more in common with place-and-route design for computer hardware than it does with compiling programs into instructions for classical computers. In the area of so-called Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology, heterogeneity has to be taken into account, i.e. individual qubits and couplers between them vary dramatically in fidelity or quality. The talk will cover software to optimize the placement of program variables into qubit storage locations on the processor, and to maximize the fidelity of operations when moving the variables around inside the processor. Unfortunately, the problem is inherently NP hard such that compiling even for 20 qubits is challenging. Hence, heuristics such as beam search are applied to the problem.