Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2604.19855

Toward designing workload-aware Surface Code Architectures

Archisman Ghosh, Avimita Chatterjee, Swaroop Ghosh

quant-phcs.ARSubmitted Apr 21, 2026• Announced Apr 22, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Apr 23, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Apr 21, 2026v2 · Apr 23, 2026v3 · Sep 15, 2026
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Practical quantum advantage is expected to depend on fault-tolerant quantum computing, although the architectural overhead needed to support fault tolerance is still extremely high. Prior FTQC designs generally emphasize either fast logical-qubit accessibility at the cost of significant qubit overhead, or high logical-qubit density at the cost of added workload latency. We propose an architecture that balances these competing objectives by placing surface-code patches around an ancilla-centric region, which yields nearly uniform ancilla access for all data qubits. Building on this design, we introduce a new workload-driven placement method that uses the $T$-gate profile of an application to determine an effective floorplan. We further provide a reconfigurable optimization for reducing the latency of $Y$-gate measurements on a per-workload basis. To improve flexibility, we also study concurrent execution of multiple programs on the same architecture. Numerical evaluation indicates that our approach keeps cycles per instruction near the optimal regime while reducing the number of required data tiles by up to $\sim21\%$, and achieves up to $\sim90\%$ efficiency when running 10 programs concurrently.

Comments
14 pages, 10 figures

Related papers

No Tile Left Behind: Multiprogramming for Surface-Code Architectures

Archisman Ghosh, Avimita Chatterjee, Swaroop Ghosh

Fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) is emerging as the architectural regime in which practical large-scale quantum workloads will execute. In this setting, however, multiprogramming is no longer a matter of partitioning a flat pool of qubits. Quantum error correction exposes a structured floorplan of data tiles, ancilla tiles, and magic-state service resources, so concurrent execution must account for compact placement, connectivity, routing headroom, and shared support infrastructure. This makes FTQC multiprogramming fundamentally harder than its NISQ counterpart: admission decisions can fragment the remaining floorplan, conservative reservations can waste ancilla, and dynamic contention across data, ancilla, and magic-state resources can degrade both throughput and quality of service. In this work, we develop a formal framework for FTQC multiprogramming that captures these structural constraints and their runtime implications. We formulate the baseline static allocation problem, extend it to limited-resource and online settings through hierarchy-aware scheduling policies, and further generalize it to cultivation-enabled architectures with dynamic magic-state generation. Through simulation on synthetic Clifford+T workloads, the proposed scheduler achieves a normalized system speedup of 3.1x, improving over prior FTQC multiprogramming baselines by ~29% while maintaining low mean slowdown.

quant-pharXiv:2604.25976•Apr 29, 2026•0 citations

LSQCA: Resource-Efficient Load/Store Architecture for Limited-Scale Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Takumi Kobori, Yasunari Suzuki, Yosuke Ueno +3 more

Current fault-tolerant quantum computer (FTQC) architectures utilize several encoding techniques to enable reliable logical operations with restricted qubit connectivity. However, such logical operations demand additional memory overhead to ensure fault tolerance. Since the main obstacle to practical quantum computing is the limited qubit count, our primary mission is to design floorplans that can reduce memory overhead without compromising computational capability. Despite extensive efforts to explore FTQC architectures, even the current state-of-the-art floorplan strategy devotes 50% of memory space to this overhead, not to data storage, to guarantee unit-time random access to all logical qubits. In this paper, we propose an FTQC architecture based on a novel floorplan strategy, Load/Store Quantum Computer Architecture (LSQCA), which can achieve almost 100% memory density. The idea behind our architecture is to separate the whole memory regions into small computational space called Computational Registers (CR) and space-efficient memory space called Scan-Access Memory (SAM). We define an instruction set for these abstract structures and provide concrete designs named point-SAM and line-SAM architectures. With this design, we can improve the memory density by allowing variable-latency memory access while concealing the latency with other bottlenecks. We also propose optimization techniques to exploit properties of quantum programs observed in our static analysis, such as access locality in memory reference timestamps. Our numerical results indicate that LSQCA successfully leverages this idea. In a resource-restricted situation, a specific benchmark shows that we can achieve approximately 90% memory density with 5% increase in the execution time compared to a conventional floorplan, which achieves at most 50% memory density for unit-time random access. Our design is defined as an abstract form, making this principle ubiquitous and applicable to a wide range of quantum devices, qubit-connectivity configurations, and error-correcting codes.

arXiv:2412.20486•IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)•Mar 1, 2025•4 citations

RushHour: A Dynamically Reconfigurable Lattice-Surgery Architecture

Nathaniel Tornow, Aleksandra Świerkowska, Peter Wegmann +1 more

Practical fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) requires efficient lattice surgery (LS), so that large algorithms fit on resource-constrained quantum chips. Existing approaches, however, are rigid: qubits, routing space, and resource states are allocated ahead of execution, which prevents running on small chips, leaves statically scheduled executions with large time overheads, and fixes each design at a single area of the space-time trade-off. We present dynamic LS, which enables efficient reconfiguration of the ancilla space, just-in-time allocation of resource states, and dynamic rotations of logical qubits, thereby spanning the entire space-time trade-off with a single, unified approach. We realize dynamic LS with RushHour through a hardware-compiler co-design: the RushHour ISA formalizes and programs our dynamic lattice model, the Lattice Management Unit abstracts dynamic lattice management and performs efficient lattice reconfiguration, and the RushHour Compiler compiles logical circuits for physical chips into optimized ISA programs while pipelining instructions. We evaluate RushHour against six state-of-the-art compilers and two resource models. On the smallest chips, 86% of benchmarks run only with RushHour, while existing approaches require 1.2-3.5$\times$ larger chips. On space-constrained early-FTQC chips, RushHour runs a median 2.3-7.2$\times$ faster than the best feasible alternative, while achieving results comparable to the state of the art on very large chips. RushHour's constructive results run 4.8$\times$ from an idealized-machine resource limit.

quant-pharXiv:2608.18985•Aug 20, 2026•0 citations

Architectures for Heterogeneous Quantum Error Correction Codes

Stein, Samuel, Xu Shifan, Andrew W. Cross +9 more

Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is essential for future quantum computers due to its ability to exponentially suppress physical errors. The surface code is a leading error-correcting code candidate because of its local topological structure, experimentally achievable thresholds, and support for universal gate operations with magic states. However, its physical overhead scales quadratically with number of correctable errors. Conversely, quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes offer superior scaling but lack, on their own, a clear path to universal logical computation. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly evident is becoming that there are significant advantages to designing architectures using multiple codes. Heterogeneous architectures provide a clear path to universal logical computation as well as the ability to access different resource trade offs. To address this, we propose integrating the surface code and gross code using an ancilla bus for inter-code data movement. This approach involves managing trade-offs, including qubit overhead, a constrained instruction set, and gross code (memory) routing and management. While our focus is on the gross-surface code architecture, our method is adaptable to any code combination and the constraints generated by that specific architecture. Motivated by the potential reduction of physical qubit overhead, an ever important feature in the realization of fault tolerant computation, we perform the first full system study of heterogeneous error-correcting codes, discovering architectural trade-offs and optimizing around them. We demonstrate physical qubit reductions of up to 6.42x when executing an algorithm to a specific logical error rate, at the cost of up to a 3.43x increase in execution time.

arXiv:2411.03202•Nov 5, 2024•1 citation

Architecting Instruction Execution for Scalable Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Dmitry Filippov, Justin Hogaboam, Mathias Soeken +3 more

Scaling fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) requires orchestrating millions of operations continuously across a tightly coupled classical-quantum control stack. A critical challenge in this orchestration is determining the optimal hardware-software boundary, i.e., the Quantum Instruction Set Architecture (QISA). We focus on cryogenic, fixed-connectivity qubit platforms, such as superconducting and topological Majorana qubits. For these, existing QISA choices either operate at too low a level, violating cryogenic thermal budgets at scale, or at too high a level, imposing unrealizable complexity on the control engine. To reason about these tradeoffs, we introduce the ARIES instruction set hierarchy, which categorizes QISAs into distinct abstraction levels. To systematically evaluate these levels, we develop an end-to-end evaluation toolflow featuring a cycle-accurate classical driver and hardware engine simulator. Using eight quantum applications across superconducting and topological qubit platforms, we measure instruction bandwidth, transceiver power dissipation, and measurement processing overheads. We demonstrate that while physical-level abstractions exceed the thermal limits of dilution refrigerators by orders of magnitude, canonical-level abstractions significantly underestimate hardware routing congestion and execution runtimes. Our Level 4 QISA (local logical operations) offers an optimal architectural balance. As quantum hardware platforms scale toward FTQC in the coming years, our findings provide concrete architectural guidance for the design of their classical control stacks and instruction interfaces.

quant-pharXiv:2610.17058•Oct 13, 2026•0 citations

SQUARE: Strategic Quantum Ancilla Reuse for Modular Quantum Programs via Cost-Effective Uncomputation

Yongshan Ding, Xin-Chuan Wu, Adam Holmes +4 more

Compiling high-level quantum programs to machines that are size constrained (i.e. limited number of quantum bits) and time constrained (i.e. limited number of quantum operations) is challenging. In this paper, we present SQUARE (Strategic QUantum Ancilla REuse), a compilation infrastructure that tackles allocation and reclamation of scratch qubits (called ancilla) in modular quantum programs. At its core, SQUARE strategically performs uncomputation to create opportunities for qubit reuse.Current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers and forward-looking Fault-Tolerant (FT) quantum computers have fundamentally different constraints such as data locality, instruction parallelism, and communication overhead. Our heuristic-based ancilla-reuse algorithm balances these considerations and fits computations into resource-constrained NISQ or FT quantum machines, throttling parallelism when necessary. To precisely capture the workload of a program, we propose an improved metric, the “active quantum volume,” and use this metric to evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm. Our results show that SQUARE improves the average success rate of NISQ applications by 1. 47X. Surprisingly, the additional gates for uncomputation create ancilla with better locality, and result in substantially fewer swap gates and less gate noise overall. SQUARE also achieves an average reduction of 1. 5X (and up to 9. 6X) in active quantum volume for FT machines.

arXiv:2004.08539•Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture/Proceedings•May 1, 2020•40 citations
Practical quantum advantage is expected to depend on fault-tolerant quantum computing, although the architectural overhead needed to support fault tolerance is still extremely high. Prior FTQC designs generally emphasize either fast logical-qubit accessibility at the cost of significant qubit overhead, or high logical-qubit density at the cost of added workload latency. We propose an architecture that balances these competing objectives by placing surface-code patches around an ancilla-centric region, which yields nearly uniform ancilla access for all data qubits. Building on this design, we introduce a new workload-driven placement method that uses the TTT-gate profile of an application to determine an effective floorplan. We further provide a reconfigurable optimization for reducing the latency of YYY-gate measurements on a per-workload basis. To improve flexibility, we also study concurrent execution of multiple programs on the same architecture. Numerical evaluation indicates that our approach keeps cycles per instruction near the optimal regime while reducing the number of required data tiles by up to ∼21%\sim21\%∼21%, and achieves up to ∼90%\sim90\%∼90% efficiency when running 10 programs concurrently.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) is emerging as the architectural regime in which practical large-scale quantum workloads will execute. In this setting, however, multiprogramming is no longer a matter of partitioning a flat pool of qubits. Quantum error correction exposes a structured floorplan of data tiles, ancilla tiles, and magic-state service resources, so concurrent execution must account for compact placement, connectivity, routing headroom, and shared support infrastructure. This makes FTQC multiprogramming fundamentally harder than its NISQ counterpart: admission decisions can fragment the remaining floorplan, conservative reservations can waste ancilla, and dynamic contention across data, ancilla, and magic-state resources can degrade both throughput and quality of service. In this work, we develop a formal framework for FTQC multiprogramming that captures these structural constraints and their runtime implications. We formulate the baseline static allocation problem, extend it to limited-resource and online settings through hierarchy-aware scheduling policies, and further generalize it to cultivation-enabled architectures with dynamic magic-state generation. Through simulation on synthetic Clifford+T workloads, the proposed scheduler achieves a normalized system speedup of 3.1x, improving over prior FTQC multiprogramming baselines by ~29% while maintaining low mean slowdown.
Current fault-tolerant quantum computer (FTQC) architectures utilize several encoding techniques to enable reliable logical operations with restricted qubit connectivity. However, such logical operations demand additional memory overhead to ensure fault tolerance. Since the main obstacle to practical quantum computing is the limited qubit count, our primary mission is to design floorplans that can reduce memory overhead without compromising computational capability. Despite extensive efforts to explore FTQC architectures, even the current state-of-the-art floorplan strategy devotes 50% of memory space to this overhead, not to data storage, to guarantee unit-time random access to all logical qubits. In this paper, we propose an FTQC architecture based on a novel floorplan strategy, Load/Store Quantum Computer Architecture (LSQCA), which can achieve almost 100% memory density. The idea behind our architecture is to separate the whole memory regions into small computational space called Computational Registers (CR) and space-efficient memory space called Scan-Access Memory (SAM). We define an instruction set for these abstract structures and provide concrete designs named point-SAM and line-SAM architectures. With this design, we can improve the memory density by allowing variable-latency memory access while concealing the latency with other bottlenecks. We also propose optimization techniques to exploit properties of quantum programs observed in our static analysis, such as access locality in memory reference timestamps. Our numerical results indicate that LSQCA successfully leverages this idea. In a resource-restricted situation, a specific benchmark shows that we can achieve approximately 90% memory density with 5% increase in the execution time compared to a conventional floorplan, which achieves at most 50% memory density for unit-time random access. Our design is defined as an abstract form, making this principle ubiquitous and applicable to a wide range of quantum devices, qubit-connectivity configurations, and error-correcting codes.
Practical fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) requires efficient lattice surgery (LS), so that large algorithms fit on resource-constrained quantum chips. Existing approaches, however, are rigid: qubits, routing space, and resource states are allocated ahead of execution, which prevents running on small chips, leaves statically scheduled executions with large time overheads, and fixes each design at a single area of the space-time trade-off. We present dynamic LS, which enables efficient reconfiguration of the ancilla space, just-in-time allocation of resource states, and dynamic rotations of logical qubits, thereby spanning the entire space-time trade-off with a single, unified approach. We realize dynamic LS with RushHour through a hardware-compiler co-design: the RushHour ISA formalizes and programs our dynamic lattice model, the Lattice Management Unit abstracts dynamic lattice management and performs efficient lattice reconfiguration, and the RushHour Compiler compiles logical circuits for physical chips into optimized ISA programs while pipelining instructions. We evaluate RushHour against six state-of-the-art compilers and two resource models. On the smallest chips, 86% of benchmarks run only with RushHour, while existing approaches require 1.2-3.5×\times× larger chips. On space-constrained early-FTQC chips, RushHour runs a median 2.3-7.2×\times× faster than the best feasible alternative, while achieving results comparable to the state of the art on very large chips. RushHour's constructive results run 4.8×\times× from an idealized-machine resource limit.
Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is essential for future quantum computers due to its ability to exponentially suppress physical errors. The surface code is a leading error-correcting code candidate because of its local topological structure, experimentally achievable thresholds, and support for universal gate operations with magic states. However, its physical overhead scales quadratically with number of correctable errors. Conversely, quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes offer superior scaling but lack, on their own, a clear path to universal logical computation. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly evident is becoming that there are significant advantages to designing architectures using multiple codes. Heterogeneous architectures provide a clear path to universal logical computation as well as the ability to access different resource trade offs. To address this, we propose integrating the surface code and gross code using an ancilla bus for inter-code data movement. This approach involves managing trade-offs, including qubit overhead, a constrained instruction set, and gross code (memory) routing and management. While our focus is on the gross-surface code architecture, our method is adaptable to any code combination and the constraints generated by that specific architecture. Motivated by the potential reduction of physical qubit overhead, an ever important feature in the realization of fault tolerant computation, we perform the first full system study of heterogeneous error-correcting codes, discovering architectural trade-offs and optimizing around them. We demonstrate physical qubit reductions of up to 6.42x when executing an algorithm to a specific logical error rate, at the cost of up to a 3.43x increase in execution time.
Scaling fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) requires orchestrating millions of operations continuously across a tightly coupled classical-quantum control stack. A critical challenge in this orchestration is determining the optimal hardware-software boundary, i.e., the Quantum Instruction Set Architecture (QISA). We focus on cryogenic, fixed-connectivity qubit platforms, such as superconducting and topological Majorana qubits. For these, existing QISA choices either operate at too low a level, violating cryogenic thermal budgets at scale, or at too high a level, imposing unrealizable complexity on the control engine. To reason about these tradeoffs, we introduce the ARIES instruction set hierarchy, which categorizes QISAs into distinct abstraction levels. To systematically evaluate these levels, we develop an end-to-end evaluation toolflow featuring a cycle-accurate classical driver and hardware engine simulator. Using eight quantum applications across superconducting and topological qubit platforms, we measure instruction bandwidth, transceiver power dissipation, and measurement processing overheads. We demonstrate that while physical-level abstractions exceed the thermal limits of dilution refrigerators by orders of magnitude, canonical-level abstractions significantly underestimate hardware routing congestion and execution runtimes. Our Level 4 QISA (local logical operations) offers an optimal architectural balance. As quantum hardware platforms scale toward FTQC in the coming years, our findings provide concrete architectural guidance for the design of their classical control stacks and instruction interfaces.
Compiling high-level quantum programs to machines that are size constrained (i.e. limited number of quantum bits) and time constrained (i.e. limited number of quantum operations) is challenging. In this paper, we present SQUARE (Strategic QUantum Ancilla REuse), a compilation infrastructure that tackles allocation and reclamation of scratch qubits (called ancilla) in modular quantum programs. At its core, SQUARE strategically performs uncomputation to create opportunities for qubit reuse.Current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers and forward-looking Fault-Tolerant (FT) quantum computers have fundamentally different constraints such as data locality, instruction parallelism, and communication overhead. Our heuristic-based ancilla-reuse algorithm balances these considerations and fits computations into resource-constrained NISQ or FT quantum machines, throttling parallelism when necessary. To precisely capture the workload of a program, we propose an improved metric, the “active quantum volume,” and use this metric to evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm. Our results show that SQUARE improves the average success rate of NISQ applications by 1. 47X. Surprisingly, the additional gates for uncomputation create ancilla with better locality, and result in substantially fewer swap gates and less gate noise overall. SQUARE also achieves an average reduction of 1. 5X (and up to 9. 6X) in active quantum volume for FT machines.