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IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering

Enabling Efficient Real-Time Calibration on Cloud Quantum Machines

Yiding Liu, Zedong Li, Alan Robertson, Xin Fu, Shuaiwen Leon Song

Published Jan 1, 2023• 13 citations

Abstract

Noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers are widely used for quantum computing (QC) from quantum cloud providers. Among them, superconducting quantum computers, with their high scalability and mature processing technology based on traditional silicon-based chips, have become the preferred solution for most commercial companies and research institutions to develop QC. However, superconducting quantum computers suffer from fluctuation due to noisy environments. To maintain reliability for every execution, calibration of the quantum processor is significantly important. During the long procedure to calibrate physical quantum bits (qubits), quantum processors must be turned into offline mode. In this work, we propose a real-time calibration framework (RCF) to execute quantum program tasks and calibrate in-demand qubits simultaneously, without interrupting quantum processors. Across a widely used noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) evaluation benchmark suite such as QASMBench, RCF achieves up to 18% reliability improvement for applications. For reliability on different physical qubits, RCF achieves an average gain of 15.7% (up to 36.7%). For cloud quantum machines, the throughput can be improved up to 9.5 throughput per minute (6.5 on average) based on baseline calibration time. In conclusion, RCF offers a reliable solution for large-scale, long-serving quantum machines.

DOI: 10.1109/tqe.2023.3276970

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Today's quantum computing is performed on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware. The NISQ era allows for a limited number of qubits with several physical limitations. As NISQ devices have unavoidable noisy quantum operations, we can execute only small circuits on a quantum machine to get reliable results. But, this leads to the quantum hardware under-utilization issue. With the increase of hardware qubit number and the improvement of error rates, it becomes possible to execute multiple circuits on a quantum chip simultaneously, enhancing the throughput and the utilization of NISQ hardware. Thus, we address a timely problem on how to execute reliably multiple quantum programs on given quantum hardware. This is the first attempt to propose a complete multi-programming process flow for executing an optimal number of workloads in parallel, ensuring output fidelity by analyzing the hardware limitations.

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