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arXiv:2409.08368

LightSABRE: A Lightweight and Enhanced SABRE Algorithm

Zou, Henry, Matthew Treinish, Hartman, Kevin, Alexander Ivrii, Jake Lishman

Published Sep 12, 2024• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We introduce LightSABRE, a significant enhancement of the SABRE algorithm that advances both runtime efficiency and circuit quality. LightSABRE addresses the increasing demands of modern quantum hardware, which can now accommodate complex scenarios, and circuits with millions of gates. Through iterative development within Qiskit, primarily using the Rust programming language, we have achieved a version of the algorithm in Qiskit 1.2.0 that is approximately 200 times faster than the implementation in Qiskit 0.20.1, which already introduced key improvements like the release valve mechanism. Additionally, when compared to the SABRE algorithm presented in Li et al., LightSABRE delivers an average decrease of 18.9\% in SWAP gate count across the same benchmark circuits. Unlike SABRE, which struggles with scalability and convergence on large circuits, LightSABRE delivers consistently high-quality routing solutions, enabling the efficient execution of large quantum circuits on near-term and future quantum devices. LightSABRE's improvements in speed, scalability, and quality position it as a critical tool for optimizing quantum circuits in the context of evolving quantum hardware and error correction techniques.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2409.08368

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We introduce LightSABRE, a significant enhancement of the SABRE algorithm that advances both runtime efficiency and circuit quality. LightSABRE addresses the increasing demands of modern quantum hardware, which can now accommodate complex scenarios, and circuits with millions of gates. Through iterative development within Qiskit, primarily using the Rust programming language, we have achieved a version of the algorithm in Qiskit 1.2.0 that is approximately 200 times faster than the implementation in Qiskit 0.20.1, which already introduced key improvements like the release valve mechanism. Additionally, when compared to the SABRE algorithm presented in Li et al., LightSABRE delivers an average decrease of 18.9% in SWAP gate count across the same benchmark circuits. Unlike SABRE, which struggles with scalability and convergence on large circuits, LightSABRE delivers consistently high-quality routing solutions, enabling the efficient execution of large quantum circuits on near-term and future quantum devices. LightSABRE's improvements in speed, scalability, and quality position it as a critical tool for optimizing quantum circuits in the context of evolving quantum hardware and error correction techniques.
Quantum Layout Synthesis (QLS) is a critical compilation stage that adapts quantum circuits to hardware constraints with an objective of minimizing the SWAP overhead. While heuristic tools demonstrate good efficiency, they often produce suboptimal solutions, and exact methods suffer from limited scalability. In this work, we propose ML-SABRE, a high-performance multilevel framework for QLS that improves both solution quality and compilation time through a hierarchical optimization approach. We employ the state-of-the-art heuristic method, LightSABRE, at all levels to ensure both efficiency and performance. Our evaluation on real benchmarks and hardware architectures shows that ML-SABRE decreases SWAP count by over 60%, circuit depth by 17%, and delivers a 60% compilation time reduction compared to state-of-the-art solvers. Further optimality studies reveal that ML-SABRE can significantly reduce the optimality gap by up to 82% for SWAP count and 49% for circuit depth, making it well-suited for emerging quantum devices with increasing size and architectural complexity.
Qubit mapping is a critical aspect of implementing quantum circuits on real hardware devices. Currently, the existing algorithms for qubit mapping encounter difficulties when dealing with larger circuit sizes involving hundreds of qubits. In this article, we introduce an innovative qubit mapping algorithm, Duostra, tailored to address the challenge of implementing large-scale quantum circuits on real hardware devices with limited connectivity. Duostra operates by efficiently determining optimal paths for double-qubit gates and inserting SWAP gates accordingly to implement the double-qubit operations on real devices. Together with two heuristic scheduling algorithms, Limitedly Exhaustive Search and Shortest-Path Estimation, it yields results of good quality within a reasonable runtime, thereby striving toward achieving quantum advantage. Experimental results showcase our algorithm’s superiority, especially for large circuits beyond the NISQ era. For example, on large circuits with more than 50 qubits, we can reduce the mapping cost on an average 21.75% over the virtual best results among QMAP, t ∣ket⟩|ket\rangle∣ket⟩ , Qiskit, and SABRE. Besides, for mid-size circuits such as the SABRE-large benchmark, we improve the mapping costs by 4.5%, 5.2%, 16.3%, 20.7%, and 25.7%, when compared to QMAP, TOQM, t ∣ket⟩|ket\rangle∣ket⟩ , Qiskit, and SABRE, respectively.
Quantum computing promises to solve certain problems more efficiently than classical computation. Realizing this potential on noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices remains challenging. Among other things, hardware connectivity constraints necessitate additional routing operations that degrade circuit fidelity. The qubit mapping problem - assigning logical qubits to physical qubits while minimizing inserted SWAP gates - is thus critical in quantum circuit transpilation. Exact methods scale poorly, and heuristic approaches like the SABRE algorithm, though efficient, rely on local decisions that can miss globally optimal solutions. In this thesis, we propose K-SWAP SABRE that integrates bounded exhaustive search over sequences of up to k SWAPs into the SABRE algorithm. A modified heuristic ensures global progress while maintaining comparability between explored branches. Experiments on benchmark circuits show that increasing k reduces required SWAP gates, especially on highly connected devices, though at the cost of longer runtime. Our results demonstrate that K-SWAP SABRE can improve heuristic qubit mapping quality without sacrificing scalability, offering a practical approach for mapping circuits to near-term and emerging quantum architectures.
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%84\%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.
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 layout synthesis (QLS) is a critical step in quantum program compilation for superconducting quantum computers, involving the insertion of SWAP gates to satisfy hardware connectivity constraints. While previous works have introduced SWAP-free benchmarks with known-optimal depths for evaluating QLS tools, these benchmarks overlook SWAP count-a key performance metric. Real-world applications often require SWAP gates, making SWAP-free benchmarks insufficient for fully assessing QLS tool performance. To address this limitation, we introduce QUBIKOS, a benchmark set with provableoptimal SWAP counts and non-trivial circuit structures. For the first time, we are able to quantify the optimality gaps of SWAP gate usages of the leading QLS algorithms, which are surprisingly large: LightSabre from IBM delivers the best performance with an optimality gap of 63x63 x63x, followed by ML-QLS with an optimality gap of 117 x. Similarly, QMAP and t∣\mathrm{t} \midt∣ ket ⟩\rangle⟩ exhibit significantly larger gaps of 250 x and 330 x, respectively. This highlights the need for further advancements in QLS methodologies. Beyond evaluation, QUBIKOS offers valuable insights for guiding the development of future QLS tools, as demonstrated through an analysis of a suboptimal case in LightSABRE. This underscores QUBIKOS’s utility as both an evaluation framework and a tool for advancing QLS research.