Quantum Circuit Compiler for a Shuttling-Based Trapped-Ion Quantum Computer
1Institute of Computer Science, Johannes Gutenberg University, Staudingerweg 9, 55128 Mainz, Germany
2Institute of Physics, Johannes Gutenberg University, Staudingerweg 7, 55128 Mainz, Germany
Published: | 2023-11-08, volume 7, page 1176 |
Eprint: | arXiv:2207.01964v4 |
Doi: | https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2023-11-08-1176 |
Citation: | Quantum 7, 1176 (2023). |
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Abstract
The increasing capabilities of quantum computing hardware and the challenge of realizing deep quantum circuits require fully automated and efficient tools for compiling quantum circuits. To express arbitrary circuits in a sequence of native gates specific to the quantum computer architecture, it is necessary to make algorithms portable across the landscape of quantum hardware providers. In this work, we present a compiler capable of transforming and optimizing a quantum circuit targeting a shuttling-based trapped-ion quantum processor. It consists of custom algorithms set on top of the quantum circuit framework Pytket. The performance was evaluated for a wide range of quantum circuits and the results show that the gate counts can be reduced by factors up to 5.1 compared to standard Pytket and up to 2.2 compared to standard Qiskit compilation.
![](https://quantum-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/title_quantum.jpg)
Featured image: The graph representation of a quantum circuit used in our paper. The purple boxes are aggregations calculated by our compiler during the compilation process. Aggregations allow the parallelization of certain single-qubit gates contained in them. The blue boxes represent superblocks. Commuting the superblocks, as shown in the image, reduces the number of shuttling operations and requires local corrections on the involved qubits, represented by the orange unitaries.
Popular summary
To run an arbitrary algorithm on such a quantum computer, the quantum circuit describing the gate sequence to be executed must be translated into instructions which the quantum computer understands. This is similar to compiling code of a high-level language into assembler code for classical computers. Just as different processors of classical computers have different instruction sets and components, which a compiler must address during compilation, different quantum computers have different native gates and properties that can be exploited to improve the accuracy of the result.
In our paper, we present a quantum circuit compiler, which transforms a given quantum circuit into the native gate set of a trapped-ion quantum computer and performs optimizations on the code to increase the accuracy of the result. Such optimizations include various ways of reducing the number of gates performed, as well as rearranging them so that the circuit has more favorable properties, such as less ion movement.
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