Due to the short decohorence time of qubits available in the NISQ-era, it is essential to pack (minimize the size and or the depth of) a logical quantum circuit as efficiently as possible given a sparsely coupled physical architecture. In this work we introduce a locality-aware qubit routing algorithm based on a graph theoretic framework. Our algorithm is designed for the grid and certain “grid-like” architectures. We experimentally show the competitiveness of algorithm by comparing it against the approximate token swapping algorithm, which is used as a primitive in many state-of-the-art quantum transpilers. Our algorithm produces circuits of comparable depth (better on random permutations) while being an order of magnitude faster than a typical implementation of the approximate token swapping algorithm.
Due to the short decohorence time of qubits available in the NISQ-era, it is essential to pack (minimize the size and or the depth of) a logical quantum circuit as efficiently as possible given a sparsely coupled physical architecture. In this work we introduce a locality-aware qubit routing algorithm based on a graph theoretic framework. Our algorithm is designed for the grid and certain “grid-like” architectures. We experimentally show the competitiveness of algorithm by comparing it against the approximate token swapping algorithm, which is used as a primitive in many state-of-the-art quantum transpilers. Our algorithm produces circuits of comparable depth (better on random permutations) while being an order of magnitude faster than a typical implementation of the approximate token swapping algorithm.
Abstract In this work we propose a high-quality decomposition approach for qubit routing by swap insertion. This optimization problem arises in the context of compiling quantum algorithms formulated in the circuit model of computation onto specific quantum hardware. Our approach decomposes the routing problem into an allocation subproblem and a set of token swapping problems. This allows us to tackle the allocation part and the token swapping part separately. Extracting the allocation part from the qubit routing model of Nannicini et al. (Optimal qubit assignment and routing via integer programming, 2021, http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.06446 ), we formulate the allocation subproblem as a binary linear program. Herein, we employ a cost function that is a lower bound on the overall routing problem objective. We strengthen the linear relaxation by novel valid inequalities. For the token swapping part we develop an exact branch-and-bound algorithm. In this context, we improve upon known lower bounds on the token swapping problem. Furthermore, we enhance an existing approximation algorithm which runs much faster than the exact approach and typically is able to determine solutions close to the optimum. We present numerical results for the fully integrated allocation and token swapping problem. Obtained solutions may not be globally optimal due to the decomposition and the usage of an approximation algorithm. However, the solutions are obtained fast and are typically close to optimal. In addition, there is a significant reduction in the number of artificial gates and output circuit depth when compared to various state-of-the-art heuristics. Reducing these figures is crucial for minimizing noise when running quantum algorithms on near-term hardware. As a consequence, using the novel decomposition approach leads to compiled algorithms with improved quality. Indeed, when compiled with the novel routing procedure and executed on real hardware, our experimental results for quantum approximate optimization algorithms show an significant increase in solution quality in comparison to standard routing methods.
Quantum computer architectures impose restrictions on qubit interactions. We propose efficient circuit transformations that modify a given quantum circuit to fit an architecture, allowing for any initial and final mapping of circuit qubits to architecture qubits. To achieve this, we first consider the qubit movement subproblem and use the ROUTING VIA MATCHINGS framework to prove tighter bounds on parallel routing. In practice, we only need to perform partial permutations, so we generalize ROUTING VIA MATCHINGS to that setting. We give new routing procedures for common architecture graphs and for the generalized hierarchical product of graphs, which produces subgraphs of the Cartesian product. Secondly, for serial routing, we consider the TOKEN SWAPPING framework and extend a 4-approximation algorithm for general graphs to support partial permutations. We apply these routing procedures to give several circuit transformations, using various heuristic qubit placement subroutines. We implement these transformations in software and compare their performance for large quantum circuits on grid and modular architectures, identifying strategies that work well in practice.
In Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era devices, the output fidelity of a quantum circuit, under plausible assumptions, decreases exponentially with its size and depth. As such, optimizing these aspects becomes paramount. This is especially true for sparsely connected physical architectures where added swap gates are essential to meet device connectivity requirements. In this work, we adapt the Approximate Token Swapping (ATS) algorithm, traditionally used for routing qubits, to handle noisy settings by giving priority to specific swap sequences over others. This priority is partially determined by the error rates of the couplings in the qubit connectivity graph. We refer to this algorithm as Priority-ATS (PATS). We provide theoretical justification for PATS's effectiveness over the ATS algorithm and experimentally demonstrate its ability to improve the output state's fidelity. In our simulations, we employ a depolarizing channel to represent two-qubit gate errors, with each neighboring qubit pair having a distinct CNOT gate error rate. By applying realistic error rates, our results prominently highlight an enhanced output fidelity of the quantum circuit when PATS is employed.
In the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, the topological constraints present in many of the currently available quantum devices pose a physical limit on the feasible interactions between qubits. To comply with such limitations, the compilation of quantum circuits requires solving the Qubit Routing Problem (QRP), by inserting SWAP operations among qubits. The State of the Art provides heuristic algorithms addressing this task, yet the depth of the output circuits is often incompatible with the current limits of quantum hardware. Therefore, we propose DDRoute, a novel heuristic algorithm to solve QRP, designed to reduce the depth overhead introduced by the routing process in the compiled circuits. Our experimental evaluation proves the efficiency of our approach, with a depth reduction of up to 70% with respect to the state-of-the-art routing procedures.
The rapid progress of physical implementation of quantum computers paved the way of realising the design of tools to help users write quantum programs for any given quantum devices. The physical constraints inherent to the current NISQ architectures prevent most quantum algorithms from being directly executed on quantum devices. To enable two-qubit gates in the algorithm, existing works focus on inserting SWAP gates to dynamically remap logical qubits to physical qubits. However, their schemes lack the consideration of the depth of generated quantum circuits. In this work, we propose a depth-aware SWAP insertion scheme for qubit mapping problem in the NISQ era.
We present methods for implementing arbitrary permutations of qubits under interaction constraints. Our protocols make use of previous methods for rapidly reversing the order of qubits along a path. Given nearest-neighbor interactions on a path of length n , we show that there exists a constant ϵ≈0.034 such that the quantum routing time is at most (1−ϵ)n , whereas any swap-based protocol needs at least time n−1 . This represents the first known quantum advantage over swap-based routing methods and also gives improved quantum routing times for realistic architectures such as grids. Furthermore, we show that our algorithm approaches a quantum routing time of 2n/3 in expectation for uniformly random permutations, whereas swap-based protocols require time n asymptotically. Additionally, we consider sparse permutations that route k≤n qubits and give algorithms with quantum routing time at most n/3+O(k2) on paths and at most 2r/3+O(k2) on general graphs with radius r .