With the increasing maturity and scale of quantum hardware and its integration into HPC systems, there is a need to develop robust techniques for developing, characterizing, and benchmarking quantum-HPC applications and middleware systems. This requires a better understanding of interaction, coupling, and common execution patterns between quantum and classical workload tasks and components. This paper identifies six quantum-HPC execution motifs---recurring execution patterns characterized by distinct coupling and interaction modes. These motifs provide the basis for a suite of quantum mini-apps - simplified application prototypes that encapsulate essential characteristics of production systems. To support these developments, we introduce a mini-app framework that offers the necessary abstractions for creating and executing mini-apps across heterogeneous quantum-HPC infrastructure, making it a valuable tool for performance characterizations and middleware development.
With the increasing maturity and scale of quantum hardware and its integration into HPC systems, there is a need to develop robust techniques for developing, characterizing, and benchmarking quantum-HPC applications and middleware systems. This requires a better understanding of interaction, coupling, and common execution patterns between quantum and classical workload tasks and components. This paper identifies six quantum-HPC execution motifs---recurring execution patterns characterized by distinct coupling and interaction modes. These motifs provide the basis for a suite of quantum mini-apps - simplified application prototypes that encapsulate essential characteristics of production systems. To support these developments, we introduce a mini-app framework that offers the necessary abstractions for creating and executing mini-apps across heterogeneous quantum-HPC infrastructure, making it a valuable tool for performance characterizations and middleware development.
As quantum hardware advances, integrating quantum processing units (QPUs) into HPC environments and managing diverse infrastructure and software stacks becomes increasingly essential. Pilot-Quantum addresses these challenges as a middleware designed to provide unified application-level management of resources and workloads across hybrid quantum-classical environments. It is built on a rigorous analysis of existing quantum middleware systems and application execution patterns. It implements the Pilot Abstraction conceptual model, originally developed for HPC, to manage resources, workloads, and tasks. It is designed for quantum applications that rely on task parallelism, including (i) hybrid algorithms, such as variational approaches, and (ii) circuit cutting systems, used to partition and execute large quantum circuits. Pilot-Quantum facilitates seamless integration of QPUs, classical CPUs, and GPUs, while supporting high-level programming frameworks like Qiskit and Pennylane. This enables users to efficiently design and execute hybrid workflows across diverse computing resources. The capabilities of Pilot-Quantum are demonstrated through mini-apps -- simplified yet representative kernels focusing on critical performance bottlenecks. We demonstrate the capabilities of Pilot-Quantum through multiple mini-apps, including different circuit executions (e.g., using IBMś Eagle QPU and simulators), circuit cutting, and quantum machine learning scenarios.
Quantum computing is important for science and industry as it offers the potential to solve certain complex problems and perform calculations significantly faster than classical computers. Quantum computing systems evolved from monolithic systems towards modular architectures comprising multiple quantum processing units (QPUs) coupled to classical computing nodes (HPC). With the increasing scale, middleware systems that facilitate the efficient coupling of quantum-classical computing are becoming critical. Through an in-depth analysis of quantum applications, integration patterns and systems, we identified a gap in understanding Quantum-HPC middleware systems. We present a conceptual middleware to facilitate reasoning about quantum-classical integration and serve as the basis for a future middleware system. A key contribution of this paper lies in leveraging well-established high-performance computing abstractions for managing workloads, tasks, and resources to seamlessly integrate quantum computing into HPC systems.
Hybrid quantum-classical applications pose significant resource management challenges due to heterogeneity and dynamism in both infrastructure and workloads. Quantum-HPC environments integrate quantum processing units (QPUs) with diverse classical resources (CPUs, GPUs), while applications span coupling patterns from tightly coupled execution to loosely coupled task parallelism with varying resource requirements. Traditional HPC schedulers lack visibility into application semantics and cannot respond to fluctuating resource availability at runtime. This paper presents a middleware-based approach for adaptive resource, workload, and task management in hybrid quantum-HPC systems. We make four contributions: (i) a conceptual four-layer middleware architecture that decomposes management across workflow, workload, task, and resource levels, enabling application-aware scheduling over heterogeneous quantum-HPC resources; (ii) a set of execution motifs capturing interaction and coupling characteristics of hybrid applications, realized as quantum mini-apps for systematic workload characterization; (iii) Pilot-Quantum, a middleware framework built on the pilot abstraction that enables late binding and dynamic resource allocation, adapting to resource and workload dynamics at runtime; and (iv) Q-Dreamer, a performance modeling toolkit providing reusable components for informed workload partitioning, including a circuit-cutting optimizer that analytically derives optimal partitioning strategies. Evaluation on heterogeneous HPC platforms (Perlmutter, NVIDIA DGX with H100/B200 GPUs) demonstrates efficient multi-backend orchestration across CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs for diverse execution motifs. Q-Dreamer predicts optimal circuit cutting configurations with up to 82% accuracy.
As quantum hardware advances, integrating quantum processing units (QPUs) into HPC environments and managing diverse infrastructure and software stacks becomes increasingly essential. Pilot-Quantum addresses these challenges as a middleware designed to provide unified application-level management of resources and workloads across hybrid quantumclassical environments. It is built on a rigorous analysis of existing quantum middleware systems and application execution patterns. It implements the Pilot Abstraction conceptual model, originally developed for HPC, to manage resources, workloads, and tasks. It is designed for quantum applications that rely on task parallelism, including (i) Hybrid algorithms, such as variational approaches, and (ii) Circuit cutting systems, used to partition and execute large quantum circuits. Pilot-Quantum facilitates seamless integration of QPUs, classical CPUs, and GPUs, while supporting high-level programming frameworks like Qiskit and Pennylane. This enables users to efficiently design and execute hybrid workflows across diverse computing resources. The capabilities of Pilot-Quantum are demonstrated through mini-apps - simplified yet representative kernels focusing on critical performance bottlenecks. We demonstrate the capabilities of Pilot-Quantum through multiple mini-apps, including different circuit execution (e.g., using IBM's Eagle QPU and simulators), circuit-cutting, and quantum machine learning scenarios.
As quantum computing systems continue to mature, there is an increasing need for benchmarking methodologies that capture performance in terms of meaningful, application-level metrics. In this work, we present a scalable framework for application-level quantum benchmarking that is designed to support internal system evaluation and cross-platform comparison across technology providers. Our framework is guided by a set of core principles, including measurability, simplicity, scalability, and extensibility. We present 13 benchmark families that reflect realistic workloads across multiple domains. This enables the systematic evaluation of the quality of solutions, the total execution time, total used energy, as well as Time-to-Solution. The benchmarks are designed to be reproducible, interpretable across stakeholder groups, and adaptable to evolving system capabilities. The framework aims to bridge the gap between low-level performance metrics and real-world value, providing a unified approach to assessing quantum systems. The resulting benchmarks support development and validation and contribute to the foundation of industry-wide benchmarking standards.
Scientific applications are starting to explore the viability of quantum computing. This exploration typically begins with quantum simulations that can run on existing classical platforms, albeit without the performance advantages of real quantum resources. In the context of high-performance computing (HPC), the incorporation of simulation software can often take advantage of the powerful resources to help scale-up the simulation size. The configuration, installation and operation of these quantum simulation packages on HPC resources can often be rather daunting and increases friction for experimentation by scientific application developers. We describe a framework to help streamline access to quantum simulation software running on HPC resources. This includes an interface for circuit-based quantum computing tasks, as well as the necessary resource management infrastructure to make effective use of the underlying HPC resources. The primary contributions of this work include a classification of different usage models for quantum simulation in an HPC context, a review of the software architecture for our approach and a detailed description of the prototype implementation to experiment with these ideas using two different simulators (TNQVM & NWQ-Sim). We include initial experimental results running on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) using a synthetic workload generated via the SupermarQ quantum benchmarking framework.