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arXiv:2111.09823 · Quantum Science and Technology

NetQASM—a low-level instruction set architecture for hybrid quantum–classical programs in a quantum internet

Axel Dahlberg, Bart van der Vecht, Carlo Delle Donne, Matthew Skrzypczyk, Ingmar te Raa, Wojciech Kozlowski, Stephanie Wehner

Published Jun 1, 2022• 40 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract We introduce NetQASM, a low-level instruction set architecture for quantum internet applications. NetQASM is a universal, platform-independent and extendable instruction set with support for local quantum gates, powerful classical logic and quantum networking operations for remote entanglement generation. Furthermore, NetQASM allows for close integration of classical logic and communication at the application layer with quantum operations at the physical layer. This enables quantum network applications to be programmed in high-level platform-independent software, which is not possible using any other QASM variants. We implement NetQASM in a series of tools to write, parse, encode and run NetQASM code, which are available online. Our tools include a higher-level software development kit (SDK) in Python, which allows an easy way of programming applications for a quantum internet. Our SDK can be used at home by making use of our existing quantum simulators, NetSquid and SimulaQron, and will also provide a public interface to hardware released on a future iteration of Quantum Network Explorer.

DOI
10.1088/2058-9565/ac753f

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Abstract We introduce NetQASM, a low-level instruction set architecture for quantum internet applications. NetQASM is a universal, platform-independent and extendable instruction set with support for local quantum gates, powerful classical logic and quantum networking operations for remote entanglement generation. Furthermore, NetQASM allows for close integration of classical logic and communication at the application layer with quantum operations at the physical layer. This enables quantum network applications to be programmed in high-level platform-independent software, which is not possible using any other QASM variants. We implement NetQASM in a series of tools to write, parse, encode and run NetQASM code, which are available online. Our tools include a higher-level software development kit (SDK) in Python, which allows an easy way of programming applications for a quantum internet. Our SDK can be used at home by making use of our existing quantum simulators, NetSquid and SimulaQron, and will also provide a public interface to hardware released on a future iteration of Quantum Network Explorer.
Abstract We introduce a simulator of a quantum internet with the specific goal to support software development. A quantum internet consists of local quantum processors, which are interconnected by quantum communication channels that enable the transmission of qubits between the different processors. While many simulators exist for local quantum processors, there is presently no simulator for a quantum internet tailored towards software development. Quantum internet protocols require both classical as well as quantum information to be exchanged between the network nodes, next to the execution of gates and measurements on a local quantum processor. This requires quantum internet software to integrate classical communication programming practises with novel quantum ones. SimulaQron is built to enable application development and explore software engineering practises for a quantum internet. SimulaQron can be run on one or more classical computers to simulate local quantum processors, which are transparently connected in the background to enable the transmission of qubits or the generation of entanglement between remote processors. Application software can access the simulated local quantum processors to execute local quantum instructions and measurements, but also to transmit qubits to remote nodes in the network. SimulaQron features a modular design that performs a distributed simulation based on any existing simulation of a quantum computer capable of integrating with Python. Programming libraries for Python and C are provided to facilitate application development.
Distributed Quantum Computing (DQC) is essential for scaling quantum algorithms beyond the limitations of monolithic NISQ devices. However, the current software ecosystem forces developers to manually orchestrate low-level network resources, such as entanglement generation (EPR pairs) and classical synchronization, leading to verbose, error-prone, and non-scalable code. This paper introduces \textbf{NetQMPI}, a high-level Python framework that adapts the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard to the quantum domain using the Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) paradigm. Built as a middleware over the NetQASM SDK, NetQMPI abstracts the underlying physical topology, automating network initialization and resource management through a unified Communicator interface. We propose semantic point-to-point primitives and novel collective operations--such as expose and unexpose--that address the constraints of the No-Cloning Theorem by leveraging multipartite entanglement for data distribution. Our comparative analysis demonstrates that NetQMPI decouples algorithmic logic from network size, reducing the code complexity for generating an NNN-node GHZ state from O(N2)\mathcal{O}(N^2)O(N2) to constant complexity O(1)\mathcal{O}(1)O(1). Furthermore, the framework ensures backend agnosticism, enabling the seamless execution of high-level applications on rigorous physical simulators, such as NetSquid (via SquidASM), and future quantum hardware adhering to the NetQASM standard.
Distributed quantum computing (DQC) is emerging as a practical solution to overcome the scalability limits of individual quantum processors by interconnecting them via quantum networks. However, programming such systems remains a significant challenge due to the need to coordinate quantum operations, manage entanglement, and synchronize classical communication. This paper proposes NetQMPI as a Python library that enables high-level programming of distributed quantum applications by building on top of two key foundations: NetQASM, which abstracts the physical network layer to interface with quantum nodes and simulators such as NetSquid and SimulaQron; and NetQIR, which proposes a layered abstraction model suitable for defining a quantum version of the classical Message Passing Interface (MPI). NetQMPI provides an MPI-style programming model tailored to quantum systems. It introduces primitives such as qsend and qrecv that abstract quantum communication details like entanglement generation, and protocols. Collective operations such as qscatter or qgather are also included. This allows developers to focus on distributed algorithm design while relying on NetQMPI to handle low-level operations efficiently.
The goal of future quantum networks is to enable new internet applications that are impossible to achieve using only classical communication1–3. Up to now, demonstrations of quantum network applications4–6 and functionalities7–12 on quantum processors have been performed in ad hoc software that was specific to the experimental setup, programmed to perform one single task (the application experiment) directly into low-level control devices using expertise in experimental physics. Here we report on the design and implementation of an architecture capable of executing quantum network applications on quantum processors in platform-independent high-level software. We demonstrate the capability of the architecture to execute applications in high-level software by implementing it as a quantum network operating system—QNodeOS—and executing test programs, including a delegated computation from a client to a server13 on two quantum network nodes based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres in diamond14,15. We show how our architecture allows us to maximize the use of quantum network hardware by multitasking different applications. Our architecture can be used to execute programs on any quantum processor platform corresponding to our system model, which we illustrate by demonstrating an extra driver for QNodeOS for a trapped-ion quantum network node based on a single 40Ca+ atom16. Our architecture lays the groundwork for computer science research in quantum network programming and paves the way for the development of software that can bring quantum network technology to society. A new quantum operating system architecture is described that is capable of executing applications on quantum networks in high-level software, which is a step towards bringing quantum network technology to society.
A widely-used quantum programming paradigm comprises of both the data How and control How. Existing quantum hardware cannot well support the control How, significantly limiting the range of quantum software executable on the hardware. By analyzing the constraints in the control microarchitecture, we found that existing quantum assembly languages are either too high-level or too restricted to support comprehensive How control on the hardware. Also, as observed with the quantum microinstruction set QuMIS [1], the quantum instruction set architecture (QISA) design may suffer from limited scalability and Hexibility because of microarchitectural constraints. It is an open challenge to design a scalable and Hexible QISA which provides a comprehensive abstraction of the quantum hardware. In this paper, we propose an executable QISA, called eQASM, that can be translated from quantum assembly language (QASM), supports comprehensive quantum program How control, and is executed on a quantum control microarchitecture. With efficient timing specification, single-operation-multiple-qubit execution, and a very-long-instruction-word architecture, eQASM presents better scalability than QuMIS. The definition of eQASM focuses on the assembly level to be expressive. Quantum operations are configured at compile time instead of being defined at QISA design time. We instantiate eQASM into a 32-bit instruction set targeting a seven-qubit superconducting quantum processor. We validate our design by performing several experiments on a two-qubit quantum processor.
The goal of future quantum networks is to enable new internet applications that are impossible to achieve using solely classical communication. Up to now, demonstrations of quantum network applications and functionalities on quantum processors have been performed in ad-hoc software that was specific to the experimental setup, programmed to perform one single task (the application experiment) directly into low-level control devices using expertise in experimental physics. Here, we report on the design and implementation of the first architecture capable of executing quantum network applications on quantum processors in platform-independent high-level software. We demonstrate the architecture's capability to execute applications in high-level software, by implementing it as a quantum network operating system -- QNodeOS -- and executing test programs including a delegated computation from a client to a server on two quantum network nodes based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. We show how our architecture allows us to maximize the use of quantum network hardware, by multitasking different applications on a quantum network for the first time. Our architecture can be used to execute programs on any quantum processor platform corresponding to our system model, which we illustrate by demonstrating an additional driver for QNodeOS for a trapped-ion quantum network node based on a single 40Ca+^{40}\text{Ca}^+40Ca+ atom. Our architecture lays the groundwork for computer science research in the domain of quantum network programming, and paves the way for the development of software that can bring quantum network technology to society.