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IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)

Noise-aware Token Swapping for Qubit Routing

Asim Sharma, Avah Banerjee

Published Sep 17, 2023• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era devices, the output fidelity of a quantum circuit, under plausible assumptions, decreases exponentially with its size and depth. As such, optimizing these aspects becomes paramount. This is especially true for sparsely connected physical architectures where added swap gates are essential to meet device connectivity requirements. In this work, we adapt the Approximate Token Swapping (ATS) algorithm, traditionally used for routing qubits, to handle noisy settings by giving priority to specific swap sequences over others. This priority is partially determined by the error rates of the couplings in the qubit connectivity graph. We refer to this algorithm as Priority-ATS (PATS). We provide theoretical justification for PATS's effectiveness over the ATS algorithm and experimentally demonstrate its ability to improve the output state's fidelity. In our simulations, we employ a depolarizing channel to represent two-qubit gate errors, with each neighboring qubit pair having a distinct CNOT gate error rate. By applying realistic error rates, our results prominently highlight an enhanced output fidelity of the quantum circuit when PATS is employed.

DOI
10.1109/qce57702.2023.00018

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In Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era devices, the output fidelity of a quantum circuit, under plausible assumptions, decreases exponentially with its size and depth. As such, optimizing these aspects becomes paramount. This is especially true for sparsely connected physical architectures where added swap gates are essential to meet device connectivity requirements. In this work, we adapt the Approximate Token Swapping (ATS) algorithm, traditionally used for routing qubits, to handle noisy settings by giving priority to specific swap sequences over others. This priority is partially determined by the error rates of the couplings in the qubit connectivity graph. We refer to this algorithm as Priority-ATS (PATS). We provide theoretical justification for PATS's effectiveness over the ATS algorithm and experimentally demonstrate its ability to improve the output state's fidelity. In our simulations, we employ a depolarizing channel to represent two-qubit gate errors, with each neighboring qubit pair having a distinct CNOT gate error rate. By applying realistic error rates, our results prominently highlight an enhanced output fidelity of the quantum circuit when PATS is employed.
Due to the limited decoherence time of qubits in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, optimizing the size and depth of logical quantum circuits for efficient implementation on sparsely connected physical architectures is crucial. In this work, we extend the Approximate Token Swapping (ATS) algorithm by incorporating qubit priority and the size of permutation cycles to be routed. We refer to this algorithm as Priority-ATS (PATS), which also considers CNOT gate errors while constructing the routing schedule for the qubits. We provide theoretical justification for the superior effectiveness of PATS over ATS and experimentally demonstrate its ability to improve the fidelity of the output state. Furthermore, we use depolarizing error channels to model the noisy CNOT gates, where each adjacent qubit pair has a distinct error rate. By employing realistic error rates, we showcase the robust improvement in output fidelity when using PATS as opposed to a noise-oblivious ATS routing scheme.
Due to the short decohorence time of qubits available in the NISQ-era, it is essential to pack (minimize the size and or the depth of) a logical quantum circuit as efficiently as possible given a sparsely coupled physical architecture. In this work we introduce a locality-aware qubit routing algorithm based on a graph theoretic framework. Our algorithm is designed for the grid and certain “grid-like” architectures. We experimentally show the competitiveness of algorithm by comparing it against the approximate token swapping algorithm, which is used as a primitive in many state-of-the-art quantum transpilers. Our algorithm produces circuits of comparable depth (better on random permutations) while being an order of magnitude faster than a typical implementation of the approximate token swapping algorithm.
In the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ), executing quantum algorithms on actual quantum devices faces unique challenges. One such challenge is that quantum devices in this era have restricted connectivity: quantum gates are allowed to act only on specific pairs of physical qubits. For this reason, a quantum circuit needs to go through a compiling process called qubit routing before it can be executed on a quantum computer. In this study, we propose a CNOT synthesis method called the token reduction method to solve this problem. The token reduction method works for all quantum computers whose architecture is represented by connected graphs. A major difference between our method and the existing ones is that our method synthesizes a circuit to an output qubit mapping that might be different from the input qubit mapping. The final mapping for the synthesis is determined dynamically during the synthesis process. Results showed that our algorithm consistently outperforms the best publicly accessible algorithm for all of the tested quantum architectures.
This work presents a routing-aware pruning strategy for quantum circuits executed on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. We propose a method to remove parametric controlled rotations whose small rotation angles do not justify the routing overhead required for their implementation. By selectively pruning such gates, the method mitigates fidelity loss arising from additional SWAP operations introduced during compilation. Our approach evaluates whether executing a gate leads to greater fidelity loss than omitting it. Simulations on benchmark circuits with realistic noise models show that the method reduces two-qubit gate counts (up to 48.6%) while improving final state fidelity (up to 47.7%), especially for larger circuits where routing costs dominate.
Quantum computing is gaining momentum in revolutionizing the way we approach complex problem-solving. However, the practical implementation of quantum algorithms remains a significant challenge due to the error-prone and hardware limits of near-term quantum devices. For instance, physical qubit connections are limited, which necessitates the use of quantum SWAP gates to dynamically transform the logical topology during execution. In addition, to optimize fidelity, it is essential to ensure that 1) the allocated hardware has a low error rate and 2) the number of SWAP gates injected into the circuit is minimized. To address these challenges, we propose a suite of algorithms: the Fidelity-aware Graph Extraction Algorithm (FGEA) is used to identify the hardware region with the lowest probability of error, the Frequency-based Mapping Algorithm (FMA) allocates logical-physical qubits that reduce the potential distance of topological transformation, and the Heuristic Routing Algorithm (HRA) searches for an optimal swapping injection strategy. We evaluate the proposed algorithms on the IBM-provided Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computer, using a dataset consisting of 17 different quantum circuits of various sizes. The circuits are executed on the IBM Toronto Falcon processor. The three proposed algorithms outperform the existing SABRE algorithm in reducing the number of SWAP gates required. Therefore, our proposed algorithms hold significant promise in enhancing the fidelity and reducing the number of SWAP gates required in implementing Quantum algorithms.
Quantum computing promises breakthroughs in simulating and solving complex, classically intractable problems. However, current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices are relatively small and error-prone, prohibiting large-scale computations. To achieve quantum advantage in this regime, it is crucial to minimise the impact of noise from qubit decoherence and two-qubit gates. A direct approach is to optimise quantum circuit compilation, particularly by improving how circuits are mapped onto hardware. This work targets multi-qubit pathfinding (MQPF), a key subproblem in quantum circuit mapping, formulated as a variant of the token swapping problem. We propose an adaptable algorithm, modelled as a binary integer linear program, that routes KKK teams of qubits on hardware graphs using swap operations. The algorithm minimises SWAP-gate depth and accumulated gate and idle errors, effectively solving a weighted version of the parallel (K+1K+1K+1)-coloured token swapping problem. We benchmark performance across various hardware layouts, comparing runtimes, SWAP depths, gate counts, and errors. Our results show that the proposed MQPF algorithm offers significantly improved runtime scaling and lower accumulated errors over a state-of-the-art exact SMT-CBS-based method. Potential applications include precomputing optimal routing for circuit mappers, benchmarking heuristics, and informing quantum hardware design by analysing pathfinding behaviour.