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IEEE International On-Line Testing Symposium (IOLTS)

Quantum Noise in the Flow of Time: A Temporal Study of the Noise in Quantum Computers

Betis Baheri, Qiang Guan, Vipin Chaudhary, Ang Li

Published Sep 12, 2022• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Over the last couple of years, Quantum Computing (QC) has captured the interest of computer scientists due to the fact of quantum speedup, the possibility of solving NPhard problems, and achieving higher compute power. However, mitigating the impact of the noise inside each quantum device presents an immediate challenge. These changes open up new opportunities to investigate the effect of calibration parameters for individual characteristics of each qubit in a manner of time. In this paper, we investigate the temporal behavior of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers based on calibration data and the characteristics of individual devices. In particular, we collect calibration data of IBM-Q machines over the last two years and compare the quantum error robustness against the processor types, quantum topology, and quantum volumes of the IBM-Q machines.

DOI
10.1109/iolts56730.2022.9897404

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Over the last couple of years, Quantum Computing (QC) has captured the interest of computer scientists due to the fact of quantum speedup, the possibility of solving NPhard problems, and achieving higher compute power. However, mitigating the impact of the noise inside each quantum device presents an immediate challenge. These changes open up new opportunities to investigate the effect of calibration parameters for individual characteristics of each qubit in a manner of time. In this paper, we investigate the temporal behavior of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers based on calibration data and the characteristics of individual devices. In particular, we collect calibration data of IBM-Q machines over the last two years and compare the quantum error robustness against the processor types, quantum topology, and quantum volumes of the IBM-Q machines.
The growth of need of quantum computers in many domains such as machine learning, numerical scientific simulation and finance has urged the quantum computers to produce more stable and less error-prone results. However, to mitigate the impact of the noise inside each quantum device remains a present challenge. In this paper, we investigate the temporal behavior of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computer errors based on calibration data and the characteristics of individual devices. In particular, we collect calibration data of IBM-Q machines over 90 days and compare the quantum error robustness across processor types, quantum topology and quantum volumes. We analyze the aging effect by comparing the quantum error data from four IBM quantum computers during 2019-2021 showing that only one computer experienced significant error growth overtime. In this study, we simply analyze the collected data and run temporal test analysis to observe the behaviour of IBM-Q computers.
Although the building of quantum computers has kept making rapid progress in recent years, noise is still the main challenge for any application to leverage the power of quantum computing. Existing works addressing noise in quantum devices proposed noise reduction when deploying a quantum algorithm to a specified quantum computer. The reproducibility issue of quantum algorithms has been raised since the noise levels vary on different quantum computers. Importantly, existing works largely ignore the fact that the noise of quantum devices varies as time goes by. Therefore, reproducing the results on the same hardware will even become a problem. We analyze the reproducibility of quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms based on daily model training and execution data collection. Our analysis shows a correlation between our QML models' test accuracy and quantum computer hardware's calibration features. We also demonstrate that noisy simulators for quantum computers are not a reliable tool for quantum machine learning applications.
In recent years, Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers have been widely used as a test bed for quantum dynamics. This work provides a new hardware-agnostic framework for modelling the Markovian noise and dynamics of quantum systems in benchmark procedures used to evaluate device performance. As an accessible example, the application and performance of this framework is demonstrated on IBM Quantum computers. This framework serves to extract multiple calibration parameters simultaneously through a simplified process which is more reliable than previously studied calibration experiments and tomographic procedures. Additionally, this method allows for real-time calibration of several hardware parameters of a quantum computer within a comprehensive procedure, providing quantitative insight into the performance of each device to be accounted for in future quantum circuits. The framework proposed here has the additional benefit of highlighting the consistency among qubit pairs when extracting parameters, which leads to a less computationally expensive calibration process than evaluating the entire device at once.
Running quantum programs is fraught with challenges on on today's noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Many of these challenges originate from the error characteristics that stem from rapid decoherence and noise during measurement, qubit connections, crosstalk, the qubits themselves, and transformations of qubit state via gates. Not only are qubits not “created equal”, but their noise level also changes over time. IBM is said to calibrate their quantum systems once per day and reports noise levels (errors) at the time of such calibration. This information is subsequently used to map circuits to higher quality qubits and connections up to the next calibration point. This work provides evidence that there is room for improvement over this daily calibration cycle. It contributes a technique to measure noise levels (errors) related to qubits immediately before executing one or more sensitive circuits and shows that just-in-time noise measurements can benefit late physical qubit mappings. With this just-in-time recalibrated transpilation, the fidelity of results is improved over IBM's default mappings, which only uses their daily calibrations. The framework assess two major sources of noise, namely readout errors (measurement errors) and two-qubit gate/connection errors. Experiments indicate that the accuracy of circuit results improves by 3-304% on average and up to 400% with on-the-fly circuit mappings based on error measurements just prior to application execution.
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.
Numerous public cloud infrastructure providers today allow for access to Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers. Changes in the environment or the machine configuration may affect their dependability. Through analysis of real quantum computer calibration data, this work demonstrates that quantum computers available from IBM Quantum experience periods of fluctuation or abrupt qubit frequency changes. This work further analyzes the correlation between the frequency change events, decoherence times, gate errors, and machine maintenance or offline periods. The results highlight that the properties of NISQ computers change over time, affecting their dependability, but not all of the changes can be explained with publicly available data.