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Reducing the CNOT count for Clifford+T circuits on NISQ architectures

Priyanka Mukhopadhyay, Vlad Gheorghiu, Jiaxin Huang, Sarah Meng Li, Michele Mosca

Published May 16, 2022• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

While mapping a quantum circuit to the physical layer one has to consider the numerous constraints imposed by the underlying hardware architecture. Connectivity of the physical qubits is one such constraint that restricts two-qubit operations, such as CNOT, to “connected’‘ qubits. SWAP gates can be used to place the logical qubits on admissible physical qubits, but they entail a significant increase in CNOT-count. In this paper we consider the problem of reducing the CNOT-count in Clifford+T circuits on connectivity constrained architectures, like noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing devices. We “slice’‘ the circuit at the position of Hadamard gates and “build” the intermediate {CNOT,T} sub-circuits using Steiner trees, significantly improving on previous methods. We compared the performance of our algorithms while mapping different benchmark and random circuits to some well-known architectures such as 9-qubit square grid, 16-qubit square grid, Rigetti 16-qubit Aspen, 16-qubit IBM QX5 and 20-qubit IBM Tokyo. Our methods give less CNOT-count compared to Qiskit transpiler as well as using SWAP gates. Assuming most of the errors in a NISQ circuit implementation are due to CNOT errors, then our method would allow circuits with few times more CNOT gates be reliably implemented than the previous methods would permit.

DOI
10.36227/techrxiv.19742422.v1

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While mapping a quantum circuit to the physical layer one has to consider the numerous constraints imposed by the underlying hardware architecture. Connectivity of the physical qubits is one such constraint that restricts two-qubit operations, such as CNOT, to “connected’‘ qubits. SWAP gates can be used to place the logical qubits on admissible physical qubits, but they entail a significant increase in CNOT-count. In this paper we consider the problem of reducing the CNOT-count in Clifford+T circuits on connectivity constrained architectures, like noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing devices. We “slice’‘ the circuit at the position of Hadamard gates and “build” the intermediate {CNOT,T} sub-circuits using Steiner trees, significantly improving on previous methods. We compared the performance of our algorithms while mapping different benchmark and random circuits to some well-known architectures such as 9-qubit square grid, 16-qubit square grid, Rigetti 16-qubit Aspen, 16-qubit IBM QX5 and 20-qubit IBM Tokyo. Our methods give less CNOT-count compared to Qiskit transpiler as well as using SWAP gates. Assuming most of the errors in a NISQ circuit implementation are due to CNOT errors, then our method would allow circuits with few times more CNOT gates be reliably implemented than the previous methods would permit.
While mapping a quantum circuit to the physical layer one has to consider the numerous constraints imposed by the underlying hardware architecture. Connectivity of the physical qubits is one such constraint that restricts two-qubit operations, such as CNOT, to ``connected'' qubits. SWAP gates can be used to place the logical qubits on admissible physical qubits, but they entail a significant increase in CNOT-count. In this paper we consider the problem of reducing the CNOT-count in Clifford+T circuits on connectivity constrained architectures, like noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing devices. We ``slice'' the circuit at the position of Hadamard gates and ``build'' the intermediate {CNOT,T} sub-circuits using Steiner trees, significantly improving on previous methods. We compared the performance of our algorithms while mapping different benchmark and random circuits to some well-known architectures such as 9-qubit square grid, 16-qubit square grid, Rigetti 16-qubit Aspen, 16-qubit IBM QX5 and 20-qubit IBM Tokyo. Our methods give less CNOT-count compared to Qiskit transpiler as well as using SWAP gates. Assuming most of the errors in a NISQ circuit implementation are due to CNOT errors, then our method would allow circuits with few times more CNOT gates be reliably implemented than the previous methods would permit.
While mapping a quantum circuit to the physical layer one has to consider the numerous constraints imposed by the underlying hardware architecture. Connectivity of the physical qubits is one such constraint that restricts two-qubit operations, such as CNOT, to “connected” qubits. SWAP gates can be used to place the logical qubits on admissible physical qubits, but they entail a significant increase in CNOT-count. In this article, we consider the problem of reducing the CNOT-count in Clifford+T circuits on connectivity-constrained architectures, like noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing devices. We “slice” the circuit at the position of Hadamard gates and “build” the intermediate{CNOT,T}\{\text {CNOT},{T}\}{CNOT,T}subcircuits using Steiner trees, significantly improving on previous methods. We compared the performance of our algorithms while mapping different benchmark and random circuits to some well-known architectures, such as 9-qubit square grid, 16-qubit square grid, Rigetti 16-qubit Aspen, 16-qubit IBM QX5, and 20-qubit IBM Tokyo. Our methods give less CNOT-count compared to Qiskit and TKET transpiler as well as using SWAP gates. Assuming most of the errors in an NISQ circuit implementation are due to CNOT errors, then our method would allow circuits with a few times more CNOT gates be reliably implemented than the previous methods would permit.
IBM architectures impose some restrictions the quantum circuits that can be implemented. Only gates from Clifford+T gate library can be used and not all of the CNOT gates are available. Some of the CNOT need to be mapped into a sequence of gates. In this paper we present a set of mappings to conform to the restrictions imposed by IBM's architectures. These mappings require fewer gates than SWAP gates. It is well known, that permuting the qubits will yield circuits with different number of gates. The design in this paper uses efficient mappings with qubit permutations to obtain circuits with a reduced number of gates. Results have shown that the proposed approach reduces circuits by up to 64% compared with Qiskit and up to 42% compared with another mapping algorithm.
Abstract Current quantum computers are noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Execution of quantum algorithms, represented as quantum circuits in the quantum circuit model, on such hardware requires transformation of the original circuits to comply with the hardware’s physical constraints, a process known as transpilation. One of the main constraints is limited qubit connectivity. In this work, we present an algorithm that transforms a quantum hashing circuit to satisfy architectural connectivity constraints while minimizing the number of CNOT gates (CNOT cost). The considered algorithm constructs a mapping from logical qubits to physical qubits that minimizes the CNOT cost of the resulting circuit. We optimize circuits for IBM Quantum devices.
In the near future of the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, almost all quantum computing devices will be restricted to a specific fixed qubits connectivity architecture. Thus, the synthesis of quantum circuits with limited connectivity is urgent. We design quantum circuit synthesis algorithms for basic and essential synthesis problems, such as quantum state preparation, general unitary synthesis, and quantum isometries. For any architecture, the controlled not (cnot) count is at most 5/3 times the state-of-the-art result on complete-graph architecture. For some specific architectures, such as square-grid ones, the ratio is reduced to 1.126. The numerical simulation result is confirmatory of theoretical conclusions. Our algorithms significantly reduce by more than 5050%50 additional cnot count compared to mapping algorithms. These algorithms help to implement the larger-scale algorithm in the physics device. Our results illustrate that well-designed synthesis algorithms can mitigate the problem of limited qubit connectivity in the NISQ era and may suggest the design of large-scale quantum devices.
We introduce an improved CNOT synthesis algorithm that considers nearest-neighbour interactions and CNOT gate error rates in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. Compared to IBM's Qiskit compiler, it improves the fidelity of a synthesized CNOT circuit by about 2 times on average (up to 9 times). It lowers the synthesized CNOT count by a factor of 13 on average (up to a factor of 162). Our contribution is twofold. First, we define a Cost\textsf{Cost}Cost function by approximating the average gate fidelity FavgF_{avg}Favg​. According to the simulation results, Cost\textsf{Cost}Cost fits the error probability of a noisy CNOT circuit, Prob=1−Favg\textsf{Prob} = 1 - F_{avg}Prob=1−Favg​, much tighter than the commonly used cost functions. On IBM's fake Nairobi backend, it matches Prob\textsf{Prob}Prob to within 10−310^{-3}10−3. On other backends, it fits Prob\textsf{Prob}Prob to within 10−110^{-1}10−1. Cost\textsf{Cost}Cost accurately quantifies the dynamic error characteristics and shows remarkable scalability. Second, we propose a noise-aware CNOT routing algorithm, NAPermRowCol, by adapting the leading Steiner-tree-based connectivity-aware CNOT synthesis algorithms. A weighted edge is used to encode a CNOT gate error rate and Cost\textsf{Cost}Cost-instructed heuristics are applied to each reduction step. NAPermRowCol does not use ancillary qubits and is not restricted to certain initial qubit maps. Compared with algorithms that are noise-agnostic, it improves the fidelity of a synthesized CNOT circuit across varied NISQ hardware. Depending on the benchmark circuit and the IBM backend selected, it lowers the synthesized CNOT count up to 56.95%56.95\%56.95% compared to ROWCOL and up to 21.62%21.62\%21.62% compared to PermRowCol. It reduces the synthesis Cost\textsf{Cost}Cost up to 25.71%25.71\%25.71% compared to ROWCOL and up to 9.12%9.12\%9.12% compared to PermRowCol. Our method can be extended to route a more general quantum circuit, giving a powerful new tool for compiling on NISQ devices.