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arXiv:1809.01302 · IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)

Magic-State Functional Units: Mapping and Scheduling Multi-Level Distillation Circuits for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Architectures

Yongshan Ding, Adam Holmes, Ali Javadi-Abhari, Diana Franklin, Margaret Martonosi, Frederic T. Chong

Published Oct 1, 2018• 31 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum computers have recently made great strides and are on a long-term path towards useful fault-tolerant computation. A dominant overhead in fault-tolerant quantum computation is the production of high-fidelity encoded qubits, called magic states, which enable reliable error-corrected computation. We present the first detailed designs of hardware functional units that implement space-time optimized magic-state factories for surface code error-corrected machines. Interactions among distant qubits require surface code braids (physical pathways on chip) which must be routed. Magic-state factories are circuits comprised of a complex set of braids that is more difficult to route than quantum circuits considered in previous work [1]. This paper explores the impact of scheduling techniques, such as gate reordering and qubit renaming, and we propose two novel mapping techniques: braid repulsion and dipole moment braid rotation. We combine these techniques with graph partitioning and community detection algorithms, and further introduce a stitching algorithm for mapping subgraphs onto a physical machine. Our results show a factor of 5.64 reduction in space-time volume compared to the best-known previous designs for magic-state factories.

DOI
10.1109/micro.2018.00072

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Quantum computers have recently made great strides and are on a long-term path towards useful fault-tolerant computation. A dominant overhead in fault-tolerant quantum computation is the production of high-fidelity encoded qubits, called magic states, which enable reliable error-corrected computation. We present the first detailed designs of hardware functional units that implement space-time optimized magic-state factories for surface code error-corrected machines. Interactions among distant qubits require surface code braids (physical pathways on chip) which must be routed. Magic-state factories are circuits comprised of a complex set of braids that is more difficult to route than quantum circuits considered in previous work [1]. This paper explores the impact of scheduling techniques, such as gate reordering and qubit renaming, and we propose two novel mapping techniques: braid repulsion and dipole moment braid rotation. We combine these techniques with graph partitioning and community detection algorithms, and further introduce a stitching algorithm for mapping subgraphs onto a physical machine. Our results show a factor of 5.64 reduction in space-time volume compared to the best-known previous designs for magic-state factories.
Magic State Distillation is considered to be one of the promising methods for supplying the non-Clifford resources required to achieve universal fault tolerance. Conventional MSD protocols implemented in surface codes often require multiple code blocks and lattice surgery rounds, resulting in substantial qubit overhead, especially at low target error rates. In this work, we present practical magic state distillation factories on Bivariate Bicycle (BB) codes that execute Pauli-measurement-based Clifford circuits inside a single BB code block. We formulate distillation circuit design as a joint optimization of logical qubit mapping, gate scheduling, measurement nativization, and protocol compression via qubit recycling. Based on detailed resource analysis and simulations, our BB factories have space-time volume comparable to that of leading distillation factories while delivering lower target error at a smaller qubit footprint, and are particularly compelling as second-round distillers following magic state cultivations.
Zero-level CCZCCZCCZ Distillation
Magic state distillation is a key component of fault-tolerant quantum computation, as it enables the implementation of non-Clifford gates such as the TTT gate and the CCZCCZCCZ gate via gate teleportation. However, conventional distillation protocols require a large number of logical qubits and introduce substantial spatial and temporal overhead, posing a significant bottleneck for scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation. In this work, we propose a zero-level distillation protocol that efficiently generates a high-fidelity logical CCZCCZCCZ magic state using only physical qubits on a two-dimensional square lattice with nearest-neighbor interactions. Our method leverages the transversal T/T†T/T^\daggerT/T† operation of the [[8,3,2]][[ 8,3,2 ]][[8,3,2]] code to fault-tolerantly encode the state CCZ‾∣+++⟩\overline{CCZ}|+++\rangleCCZ∣+++⟩, which is subsequently teleported to three surface-code logical qubits via lattice surgery. To enable teleportation between codes with different distances, we introduce adaptively initialized teleportation (AIT), a tailored initialization procedure for the surface code. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the logical error rate scales as pL≃300×p2p_L \simeq 300 \times p^2pL​≃300×p2 with respect to the physical error rate ppp. For example, the proposed method improves the logical error rate by approximately one and two orders of magnitude at p=10−3p = 10^{-3}p=10−3 and p=10−4p = 10^{-4}p=10−4, respectively, compared to conventional seven-TTT-gate approaches. The distillation circuit requires only 22 physical qubits, 3 logical qubits, and a circuit depth of 24, reducing the space-time overhead by a factor of approximately 5-10 compared to previous methods. This result highlights the practicality of CCZCCZCCZ-state distillation in early fault-tolerant quantum computation and offers a new direction toward resource-efficient physical-level magic state distillation beyond conventional TTT-state generation.
Magic state distillation (MSD) is an essential element for universal fault-tolerant quantum computing, which distills a high-fidelity magic state from noisy magic states using ideal (error-corrected) Clifford operations. For ideal Clifford operations, it needs to be performed on the logical qubits and hence incurs a large spatiotemporal overhead, which is one of the major bottlenecks for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQCs). Here we propose zero-level distillation, which prepares a high-fidelity logical magic state at the physical level, namely , using physical qubits and nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates on a square lattice. We develop a zero-level distillation circuit and show that distillation can be made even more efficient than the conventional sophisticated approaches with logical level distillations. The key idea involves the Knill -type distillation using the Steane code and its careful mapping to the square-lattice architecture with error detection. The distilled magic state on the Steane-code state is then teleported or converted to surface codes. We numerically find that the error rate of the logical magic state scales as approximately 100 × p 2 in terms of the physical error rate p . For example, with a physical error rate of p = 10 − 4 ( 10 − 3 ), the logical error rate is reduced to p L = 10 − 6 ( 10 − 4 ), resulting in an improvement of 2 (1) orders of magnitude. This contributes to reducing both space and time overhead for early FTQC as well as full-fledged FTQC combined with conventional multilevel distillation protocols.
Practical quantum computation requires high-fidelity instruction executions on qubits. Among them, Clifford instructions are relatively easy to perform, while non-Clifford instructions require the use of magic states. This makes magic state distillation a central procedure in fault-tolerant quantum computing. A magic state distillation factory consumes many low-fidelity input magic states and produces fewer, higher-fidelity states. To reach high fidelities, multiple distillation factories are typically chained together into a multi-level pipeline, consuming significant quantum computational resources. Our work optimizes the resource usage of distillation pipelines by introducing a novel dynamic pipeline architecture. Observing that distillation pipelines consume magic states in a burst-then-steady pattern, we develop dynamic factory scheduling and resource allocation techniques that go beyond existing static pipeline organizations. Dynamic pipelines reduce the qubit cost by 16%-70% for large-scale quantum applications and achieve average reductions of 26%-37% in qubit-time volume on generated distillation benchmarks compared to state-of-the-art static architectures. By significantly reducing the resource overhead of this building block, our work accelerates progress towards the practical realization of fault-tolerant quantum computers.
A promising approach to achieving scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation is the use of quantum error correction (QEC) codes augmented with magic states i.e. resource states produced via distillation, cultivation, or RzR_zRz​ synthesis and teleported into the circuit as needed. Because magic-state production dominates the space-time volume of fault-tolerant programs, system architects must decide how many production units to allocate. Current approaches rely on deterministic analysis that either provisions for worst-case peak demand (wasting valuable qubit resources on factories that are never simultaneously utilized) or assumes average demand, which increases execution time. In this work, we build a simulation framework that couples circuit scheduling with different stochastic magic state production models, and use it to quantify the impact of non-determinism on circuit execution. We show that non-determinism has a dual effect that deterministic models cannot capture: it inflates total execution time (the price), while deflating peak per-cycle resource demand (the payoff). For distillation-based architectures, this demand smoothing shifts the space-time-optimal provisioning point: fewer factories are needed to minimize space-time volume than deterministic analysis predicts. Across benchmarks, stochastic-aware provisioning reduces space-time volume by up to 27% compared to the deterministic optimum for distillation, while requiring up to 30% fewer factories. We characterize these effects across each preparation mechanism, map the resulting design-space tradeoffs, and demonstrate that static resource estimation systematically mis-characterizes the cost of fault-tolerant execution. Our results establish that stochastic-aware analysis is necessary for right-sizing the factory allocations and should replace deterministic heuristics as the standard methodology for FTQC resource planning.
Leading approaches to fault-tolerant quantum computation dedicate a significant portion of the hardware to computational factories that churn out high-fidelity ancillas called magic states. Consequently, efficient and realistic factory design is of paramount importance. Here we present the most detailed resource assessment to date of magic-state factories within a surface code quantum computer, along the way introducing a number of techniques. We show that the block codes of Bravyi and Haah [Phys. Rev. A 86, 052329 (2012)] have been systematically undervalued; we track correlated errors both numerically and analytically, providing fidelity estimates without appeal to the union bound. We also introduce a subsystem code realization of these protocols with constant time and low ancilla cost. Additionally, we confirm that magic-state factories have space-time costs that scale as a constant factor of surface code costs. We find that the magic-state factory required for postclassical factoring can be as small as 6.3 million data qubits, ignoring ancilla qubits, assuming ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$ error gates and the availability of long-range interactions.