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International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC)

VERITAS: Accurately Estimating the Correct Output on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computers

Tirthak Patel, Devesh Tiwari

Published Nov 1, 2020• 34 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) machines are being increasingly used to develop quantum algorithms and establish use cases for quantum computing. However, these devices are highly error-prone and produce output, which can be far from the correct output of the quantum algorithm. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, an end-to-end approach toward designing quantum experiments, executing experiments, and correcting outputs produced by quantum circuits post their execution such that the correct output of the quantum algorithm can be accurately estimated.

DOI
10.1109/sc41405.2020.00019

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•Jan 1, 2023•0 citations
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) machines are being increasingly used to develop quantum algorithms and establish use cases for quantum computing. However, these devices are highly error-prone and produce output, which can be far from the correct output of the quantum algorithm. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, an end-to-end approach toward designing quantum experiments, executing experiments, and correcting outputs produced by quantum circuits post their execution such that the correct output of the quantum algorithm can be accurately estimated.
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers are being increasingly used for executing early-stage quantum programs to establish the practical realizability of existing quantum algorithms. These quantum programs have uses cases in the realm of high-performance computing ranging from molecular chemistry and physics simulations to addressing NP-complete optimization problems. However, NISQ devices are prone to multiple types of errors, which affect the fidelity and reproducibility of the program execution. As the technology is still primitive, our understanding of these quantum machines and their error characteristics is limited. To bridge that understanding gap, this is the first work to provide a systematic and rich experimental evaluation of IBM Quantum Experience (QX) quantum computers of different scales and topologies. Our experimental evaluation uncovers multiple important and interesting aspects of benchmarking and evaluating quantum program on NISQ machines. We have open-sourced our experimental framework and dataset to help accelerate the evaluation of quantum computing systems.
Quantum computing promises exponential speedups for an important class of problems.While quantum computers with few dozens of qubits have been demonstrated, these machines suffer from a high rate of gate errors.Such machines are operated in the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) mode of computing where the output of the machine can be erroneous.In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work that aims to improve the reliability of NISQ computers by developing software techniques to mitigate hardware errors.Our first work exploits the variability in the error rates of qubits to steer more operations towards qubits with lower error rates and avoid qubits that are error-prone.Our second work looks at executing different versions of the programs each crafted to cause diverse mistakes so that the machine becomes less vulnerable to correlated errors.Our third work looks at exploiting the state-dependent bias in measurement errors (state 1 is more error-prone than state 0) and dynamically flips the state of the qubit to perform the measurement in the stronger state.We perform our evaluations on real quantum machines from IBM and demonstrate significant improvement in the overall system reliability.Finally, I will also briefly discuss the hardware aspect of designing largescale quantum computers, including cryogenic processor and cryogenic memory system.
Current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers are useful in developing the quantum computing stack, test quantum algorithms, and establish the feasibility of quantum computing. However, different statistically significant errors permeate NISQ computers. To reduce the effect of these errors, recent research has focused on effective mapping of a quantum algorithm to a quantum computer in an error-and-constraints-aware manner. We propose the first work, QRAFT, to leverage the reversibility property of quantum algorithms to considerably reduce the error beyond the reduction achieved by effective circuit mapping.
Near-term quantum computers do not have the ability to perform error correction. Such Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers can produce incorrect output as the computation is subjected to errors. The applications on a NISQ machine try to infer the correct output by running the same program thousands of times and logging the output. If the error rates are low and the errors are not correlated, then the correct answer can be inferred as the one appearing with the highest frequency. Unfortunately, quantum computers are subjected to correlated errors, which can cause an incorrect answer to appear more frequently than the correct answer.
First quantum computers very recently have demonstrated “quantum supremacy” or “quantum advantage Executing a computation that would have been impossible on a classical machine. Today's quantum computers follow the NISQ paradigm: They exhibit error rates that are much higher than in conventional electronics and have insufficient quantum resources to support powerful error correction protocols. This raises questions which relevant computations are within the reach of NISQ architectures. Several NISQ-era algorithms” are assumed to match the specifics of such computers; for instance, variational optimisers are based on intertwining relatively short quantum and classical computations, thus maximizing the chances of success. This paper will critically assess the promise and challenge of NISQ computing. What has this field achieved so far, what are we likely to achieve soon, where do we have to be skeptical and wait for the advent of larger-scale fully error-corrected architectures?
Despite rapid progress in quantum computing in the last decade, the limited usability of quantum computers remains a major roadblock toward its wider adoption. Current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers produce highly erroneous program outputs for quantum-advantage-proven algorithms - that is, algorithms that are infeasible or orders of magnitude slower on classical supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. Unfortunately, currently, quantum computing programmers lack robust system software tools and methods to make meaningful use of erroneous program executions on quantum computers. This lack of capability is the core motivation behind the fundamental question this dissertation poses: "Can we build system software tools for programmers to make the quantum program execution and output meaningful on NISQ machines?" This dissertation answers this question in the affirmative - experimentally demonstrating on real-system quantum computers that it is possible to extract near-accurate program output from noisy executions on today's erroneous quantum computers, ironically using classical HPC resources and knowledge. This dissertation demonstrates how to achieve this goal without requiring user intervention, domain knowledge about quantum algorithms, or additional quantum hardware support. Unfortunately, as this dissertation uncovers, progressing toward making quantum computers usable is a double-edged sword. In the near future, only a few entities in the world may have access to powerful quantum computers, and these quantum computers will be used to solve previously-unsolved large-scale optimization problems, possibly without an explicit trust model between the service provider and the customer. Therefore, this dissertation envisions that the solutions to such large-scale optimization problems will be considered sensitive and will need to be protected. This dissertation takes the first few steps toward preparing us for that future - by developing a novel method that intelligently obfuscates near-accurate program output and quantum circuit structure to preserve a customer's privacy under a specified computation model and resource availability. The approaches introduced in this dissertation open up new research avenues for hybrid quantum-classical computing. This dissertation also aims to lower the barrier to entry for quantum computing research for the experimental computer systems and HPC community by open-sourcing multiple novel datasets and software frameworks implemented for real-system quantum computers.--Author's abstract