Over the past few years, several quantum software stacks (QSS) have been developed in response to rapid hardware advances in quantum computing. A QSS includes a quantum programming language, an optimizing compiler that translates a quantum algorithm written in a high-level language into quantum gate instructions, a quantum simulator that emulates these instructions on a classical device, and a software controller that sends analog signals to a very expensive quantum hardware based on quantum circuits. In comparison to traditional compilers and architecture simulators, QSSes are difficult to tests due to the probabilistic nature of results, the lack of clear hardware specifications, and quantum programming complexity.
This work devises a novel differential testing approach for QSSes, named QDIFF with three major innovations: (1) We generate input programs to be tested via semantics-preserving, source to source transformation to explore program variants. (2) We speed up differential testing by filtering out quantum circuits that are not worthwhile to execute on quantum hardware by analyzing static characteristics such as a circuit depth, 2-gate operations, gate error rates, and T1 relaxation time. (3) We design an extensible equivalence checking mechanism via distribution comparison functions such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and cross entropy.
We evaluate QDiff with three widely-used open source QSSes: Qiskit from IBM, Cirq from Google, and Pyquil from Rigetti. By running QDiff on both real hardware and quantum simulators, we found several critical bugs revealing potential instabilities in these platforms. QDiff's source transformation is effective in producing semantically equivalent yet not-identical circuits (i.e., 34% of trials), and its filtering mechanism can speed up differential testing by 66%.
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This content will become publicly available on January 5, 2025
SimuQ: A Framework for Programming Quantum Hamiltonian Simulation with Analog Compilation
Quantum Hamiltonian simulation, which simulates the evolution of quantum systems and probes quantum phenomena, is one of the most promising applications of quantum computing. Recent experimental results suggest that Hamiltonian-oriented analog quantum simulation would be advantageous over circuit-oriented digital quantum simulation in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) machine era. However, programming analog quantum simulators is much more challenging due to the lack of a unified interface between hardware and software. In this paper, we design and implement SimuQ, the first framework for quantum Hamiltonian simulation that supports Hamiltonian programming and pulse-level compilation to heterogeneous analog quantum simulators. Specifically, in SimuQ, front-end users specify the target quantum system with Hamiltonian Modeling Language, and the Hamiltonian-level programmability of analog quantum simulators is specified through a new abstraction called the abstract analog instruction set (AAIS) and programmed in AAIS Specification Language by hardware providers. Through a solver-based compilation, SimuQ generates executable pulse schedules for real devices to simulate the evolution of desired quantum systems, which is demonstrated on superconducting (IBM), neutral-atom (QuEra), and trapped-ion (IonQ) quantum devices. Moreover, we demonstrate the advantages of exposing the Hamiltonian-level programmability of devices with native operations or interaction-based gates and establish a small benchmark of quantum simulation to evaluate SimuQ's compiler with the above analog quantum simulators.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1942837
- PAR ID:
- 10514838
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- POPL
- ISSN:
- 2475-1421
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2425 to 2455
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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