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ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)

A fast and scalable qubit-mapping method for noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers

Sunghye Park, Daeyeon Kim, Minhyuk Kweon, Jae‐Yoon Sim, Seokhyeong Kang

Published Jul 10, 2022• 22 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient qubit-mapping method that redesigns a quantum circuit to overcome the limitations of qubit connectivity. We propose a recursive graph-isomorphism search to generate the scalable initial mapping. In the main mapping, we use an adaptive look-ahead window search to resolve the connectivity constraint within a short runtime. Compared with the state-of-the-art method [15], our proposed method reduced the number of additional gates by 23% on average and the runtime by 68% for the three largest benchmark circuits. Furthermore, our method improved circuit stability by reducing the circuit depth and thus can be a step forward towards fault tolerance.

DOI
10.1145/3489517.3530402

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IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems•Nov 18, 2024•1 citation
This paper presents an efficient qubit-mapping method that redesigns a quantum circuit to overcome the limitations of qubit connectivity. We propose a recursive graph-isomorphism search to generate the scalable initial mapping. In the main mapping, we use an adaptive look-ahead window search to resolve the connectivity constraint within a short runtime. Compared with the state-of-the-art method [15], our proposed method reduced the number of additional gates by 23% on average and the runtime by 68% for the three largest benchmark circuits. Furthermore, our method improved circuit stability by reducing the circuit depth and thus can be a step forward towards fault tolerance.
The noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computer significantly advances quantum computing technology. Due to the physical connectivity constraints of the NISQ device, its induced qubit mapping problem becomes more challenging. Recent works employ heuristics to achieve promising outcomes. However, they are limited to using only one type of center for graph matching, and their exhaustive traversal of the coupling graph results in high computation time. This paper strategically generates specific subgraphs during the initial mapping stage to reduce the solution space for the coupling graph. Then, we employ a bidirectional graph isomorphism search to improve initial mapping. In the main mapping stage, we develop an efficient search algorithm to minimize the number of inserted gates. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art work in reducing the number of inserted CNOT gates by 13.22% and the runtime by 19.61%.
Mapping logical quantum circuits to Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices is a challenging problem which has attracted rapidly increasing interests from both quantum and classical computing communities. This article proposes an efficient method by (i) selecting an initial mapping that takes into consideration the similarity between the architecture graph of the given NISQ device and a graph induced by the input logical circuit and (ii) searching, in a filtered and depth-limited way, a most usefulswapcombination that makes executable as many as possible two-qubit gates in the logical circuit. The proposed circuit transformation algorithm can significantly decrease the number of auxiliary two-qubit gates required to be added to the logical circuit, especially when it has a large number of two-qubit gates. For an extensive benchmark set of 131 circuits and IBM's current premium Q system, viz., IBM Q Tokyo, our algorithm needs, in average, 0.3801 extra two-qubit gates per input two-qubit gate, while the corresponding figures for three state-of-the-art algorithms are 0.4705, 0.8154, and 1.0066, respectively.
The qubit mapping approach serves to transform a quantum logical circuit (LC) into a physical one that satisfies the connectivity constraints imposed by the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. The quality of the physical circuit generated by a mapping approach depends largely on the initial mapping, which specifies the correspondence between the qubits in the LC and the qubits on the NISQ device. There are a total ofn!n!n!different initial mappings for a qubit mapping problem withnnnqubits, and among them, there is at least one initial mapping corresponding to the smallest physical circuit that this mapping approach can output. Finding such an initial mapping is very important for reliable computations on the NISQ device. To this end, we propose an iterated local search framework as well as a heuristic circuit mapper. In this framework, we perform multiple local searches on the space of initial mappings, and during each local search, several promising neighborhoods of the current initial mapping are generated and evaluated by invoking the circuit mapper in a forward or a backward manner. This framework provides a way for the qubit mapping approach to find the best physical circuit that it can produce, allowing it to trade time for circuit quality, which is necessary in the NISQ era. The experimental results demonstrate the stability, scalability, and effectiveness of this approach in reducing the number of additional gates. Moreover, although this approach is a multipass circuit mapping process, it can generate a good-quality physical circuit within half an hour, even for the circuit with more than 10 000 gates.
Quantum computing has already demonstrated great computational potential across multiple domains and has received more and more attention. However, due to the connectivity limitations of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, most of the quantum algorithms cannot be directly executed without the help of inserting SWAP gates. Nevertheless, more SWAP gates lead to a longer execution time and, inevitably, lower fidelity of the algorithm. To this end, this paper proposes an optimized qubit mapping algorithm based on a dynamic look-ahead strategy to minimize the number of SWAP gates inserted. Firstly, a heuristic algorithm is proposed based on maximizing physical qubit connectivity to generate the optimal initial qubit mapping, which reduces the need for logical qubit shifts during subsequent SWAP gate insertion. Secondly, in the form of directed acyclic graphs, we identify quantum gates that violate the constraints of physical coupling and insert SWAP gates to remap qubits, thereby overcoming the limitations of qubit interactions. Finally, the optimal SWAP gate insertion strategy is built by comparing the cost of different SWAP gate insertion strategies through a multi-window look-ahead strategy to reduce the number of SWAP gates inserted. The experimental results show that the strategy in this paper decreases the number of SWAP gate insertions and significantly reduces the depth of quantum circuits when performing qubit mapping compared with state-of-the-art methods.
In the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing, the limited connectivity between qubits is one of the common physical limitations faced by current quantum computing devices. Quantum circuit mapping methods transform quantum circuits into equivalent circuits that satisfy physical connectivity constraints by remapping logical qubits, making them executable. The optimization problem of quantum circuit mapping has NP-hard computational complexity, and existing heuristic mapping algorithms still have significant potential for optimization in terms of the number of quantum gates generated. To reduce the number of SWAP gates inserted during mapping, the solution space of the mapping problem is represented as a tree structure, and the mapping process is equivalent to traversing this tree structure. To effectively and efficiently complete the search process, a beam search framework (BSF) is proposed for solving quantum circuit mapping. By iteratively selecting, expanding, and making decisions, high-quality target circuits are generated. Experimental results show that this method can significantly reduce the number of inserted SWAP gates on medium to large circuits, achieving an average reduction of 44% compared to baseline methods, and is applicable to circuits of various sizes and complexities.
Quantum computing has been accumulating tremendous attention in recent years. In current superconducting quantum processors, each qubit can only be connected with a limited number of neighbors. Therefore, the original quantum circuit should be converted to a hardware-dependent circuit, and this process is called qubit mapping and routing, in which typically extra SWAP gates need to be inserted. Due to a limited qubit lifetime, one of the main objectives of qubit mapping and routing is to minimize the circuit depth, which is a time-consuming process. By studying several existing greedy mappers, we extract and analyze two patterns that significantly impact the mapping and routing performance. Then, we propose a sliding window method named SWin, which dramatically reduces the computational cost with negligible performance degradation. For devices with constrained executable circuit depth, we propose SWin+, which introduces adaptive circuit slicing methods with VF2++2+ {+}2++subgraph isomorphism initial mapping methods. Compared with the state-of-the-art greedy methods, SWin can find an effective result by up to 39% depth decrease, on average of 16% for large-scale circuits. Moreover, SWin can be easily modified to be noise-aware, while the depth reduction will yield better performance for real execution. Furthermore, SWin still performs well for various chip couplings. SWin+ significantly enhances processing efficiency, achieving improvements up to$22.3\times $, with an average increase of$6.1\times $. Concurrently, it maintains the effectiveness of the transformed circuit depth.