Current superconducting quantum devices impose strict connectivity constraints on quantum circuit execution, necessitating circuit transformation before executing quantum circuits on physical hardware. Numerous quantum circuit transformation (QCT) algorithms have been proposed. To enable faithful evaluation of state-of-the-art QCT algorithms, this paper introduces (Qubit mapping Benchmark with Known Near-Optimality), a novel benchmark construction method for QCT. QKNOB circuits have built-in transformations with near-optimal (close to the theoretical optimum) SWAP count and depth overhead. QKNOB provides general and unbiased evaluation of QCT algorithms. Using QKNOB, we demonstrate that SABRE, the default Qiskit compiler, consistently achieves the best performance on the 53-qubit IBM Q Rochester and Google Sycamore devices for both SWAP count and depth objectives. Our results also reveal significant performance gaps relative to the near-optimal transformation costs of QKNOB. Our construction algorithm and benchmarks are open-source.
Current superconducting quantum devices impose strict connectivity constraints on quantum circuit execution, necessitating circuit transformation before executing quantum circuits on physical hardware. Numerous quantum circuit transformation (QCT) algorithms have been proposed. To enable faithful evaluation of state-of-the-art QCT algorithms, this paper introduces (Qubit mapping Benchmark with Known Near-Optimality), a novel benchmark construction method for QCT. QKNOB circuits have built-in transformations with near-optimal (close to the theoretical optimum) SWAP count and depth overhead. QKNOB provides general and unbiased evaluation of QCT algorithms. Using QKNOB, we demonstrate that SABRE, the default Qiskit compiler, consistently achieves the best performance on the 53-qubit IBM Q Rochester and Google Sycamore devices for both SWAP count and depth objectives. Our results also reveal significant performance gaps relative to the near-optimal transformation costs of QKNOB. Our construction algorithm and benchmarks are open-source.
Quantum circuit transformation (QCT, a.k.a. qubit mapping) is a critical step in quantum circuit compilation. Typically, QCT is achieved by finding an appropriate initial mapping and using SWAP gates to route the qubits such that all connectivity constraints are satisfied. The objective of QCT can be to minimise circuit size or depth. Most existing QCT algorithms prioritise minimising circuit size, potentially overlooking the impact of single-qubit gates on circuit depth. In this paper, we first point out that a single SWAP gate insertion can double the circuit depth, and then propose a simple and effective method that takes into account the impact of single-qubit gates on circuit depth. Our method can be combined with many existing QCT algorithms to optimise circuit depth. The Qiskit SABRE algorithm has been widely accepted as the state-of-the-art algorithm for optimising both circuit size and depth. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by embedding it in SABRE, showing that it can reduce circuit depth by up to 50% and 27% on average on, for instance, Google Sycamore and 117 real quantum circuits from MQTBench.
Quantum computers with a limited qubit connectivity require inserting SWAP gates for qubit routing, which increases gate execution errors and the impact of environmental noise due to an overhead in circuit depth. In this work, we benchmark various routing techniques considering random quantum circuits on one-dimensional and square lattice connectivities, employing both analytical and numerical methods. We introduce circuit fidelity as a comprehensive metric that captures the effects of SWAP and circuit depth overheads. Leveraging a novel approach based on the SABRE algorithm, we achieve up to 84% higher average circuit fidelity for large devices within the NISQ range, compared to previously existing methods. Additionally, our results highlight that the optimal routing choice critically depends on the qubit count and the hardware characteristics, including gate fidelities and coherence times.
Efficiently mapping quantum circuits onto hardware is integral for the quantum compilation process, wherein a circuit is modified in accordance with a quantum processor’s connectivity. Many techniques currently exist for solving this problem, wherein SWAP-gate overhead is usually prioritized as a cost metric. We reconstitute quantum circuit mapping using tools from quantum information theory, showing that a lower bound, which we dub the lightcone bound, emerges for a circuit executed on hardware. We also develop an initial placement algorithm based on graph similarity search, aiding us in optimally placing circuit qubits onto a device. 600 realistic benchmarks using the IBM Qiskit compiler and a brute-force method are then tested against the lightcone bound, with results unambiguously verifying the veracity of the bound, while permitting trustworthy estimations of minimal overhead in near-term realizations of quantum algorithms. This work constitutes the first use of quantum circuit uncomplexity to practically-relevant quantum computing.
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers impose severe architectural constraints that prevent direct execution of logical quantum circuits. As a result, quantum circuit mapping—transforming ideal circuits into hardware-compatible forms—has become a critical task in quantum software toolchains. This paper presents a comparative study of key mapping techniques, focusing on circuit depth, SWAP gate overhead, and fidelity awareness. Through a case analysis on a 5-qubit Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) circuit, we demonstrate the performance trade-offs of several prominent mapping strategies, including naive greedy routing, Qiskit’s SABRE, and CQC’s t|ket>. Our findings reveal that mapping technique selection has a profound impact on circuit quality and feasibility on real NISQ hardware.
Quantum computers are superior to existing classical supercomputers in terms of run time for specific tasks, and various studies on quantum computers are in progress. Despite this, there is a significant gap in technology between available technologies and actual quantum computers on the noisy intermediate-scale quantum-scale. Currently, various quantum algorithms have been implemented and verified using quantum simulations. Therefore, the runtime performance of a quantum circuit can be verified in the same environment as a real quantum machine. A quantum compiler compiles quantum circuits. When a quantum circuit is compiled, logical qubits in a quantum circuit should be mapped to physical qubits, called qubit mapping. As qubit mapping is an NP-Complete problem, the compilation time increases exponentially according to the number of qubits. Therefore, various studies on effective qubit mapping techniques have been developed to accelerate the execution time. This paper proposes a new parallelized Qubit mapping algorithm. The proposed method consists of three-step processes: one circuit is divided into several circuits; the SABRE enhanced algorithm is executed on each circuit in parallel and then merged. The performance was evaluated using 10 benchmarks. The experimental results revealed an acceleration of up to 6.42x and an average speed up of 4.8x, with an average overhead of 1.03x in terms of the number of gates obtained. The proposed method outperformed the well-known modern qubit-mapping algorithm in terms of the execution time with exponential speedup improvement.
Realizing a conceptual quantum algorithm on an actual physical device necessitates the algorithm's quantum circuit description to undergo certain transformations in order to adhere to all constraints imposed by the hardware. In this regard, the individual high-level circuit components are first synthesized to the supported low-level gate-set of the quantum computer, before being mapped to the target's architecture-utilizing several optimizations in order to improve the compilation result. Specialized tools for this complex task exist, e.g., IBM's Qiskit, Google's Cirq, Microsoft's QDK, or Rigetti's Forest. However, to date, the circuits resulting from these tools are hardly verified, which is mainly due to the immense complexity of checking if two quantum circuits indeed realize the same functionality. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme for quantum circuit equivalence checking-specialized for verifying results of the IBM Qiskit quantum circuit compilation flow. To this end, we combine characteristics unique to quantum computing, e.g., its inherent reversibility, and certain knowledge about the compilation flow into a dedicated equivalence checking strategy. Experimental evaluations confirm that the proposed scheme allows to verify even large circuit instances with tens of thousands of operations within seconds or even less, whereas state-of-the-art techniques frequently time-out or require substantially more runtime. A corresponding open source implementation of the proposed method is publicly available at https://github.com/iic-jku/qcec.