SHF: FET: Medium: Designing and Synthesizing a Quantum Circuit Compiler

量子计算机可以推动量子物理学、化学、材料设计、优化、机器学习等领域的进步。如今，世界各地的科学家和工程师正在竞相建造更大、更可靠的量子计算机，并证明它们在评估日益复杂的量子程序（电路）方面的有效性。不幸的是，尽管量子计算机在计算上很强大，但从根本上说它是有噪声的，而减轻噪声是释放量子计算机真正潜力的主要障碍。这个项目的重点是电路编译器，它优化量子电路并将电路映射到物理量子计算机。考虑到当前和未来量子计算机的尺寸很小，而且它们的计算噪音很大，仔细编译对于在量子计算机上产生准确可靠的结果至关重要。该项目的新颖性是双重的-使用合成框架来自动生成量子编译器和自适应运行时的部分，这些编译器和自适应运行时可以定制量子电路以实现更高的可靠性。该项目的影响是编译器工具的开发，广泛的研究人员可以利用这些工具对量子计算系统进行编程、基准测试和优化。目前，量子硬件的状态在不断变化，量子计算机有许多物理实现，物理学家不断尝试新的设备和架构。对于每一个新的物理基底和计算机的每一次修改，都需要修改或重写主要的编译器部分来运行实验。该项目旨在创建一个框架，根据硬件约束自动合成量子电路优化器，映射器和运行时系统。它侧重于三个方面：（1）自动发现和验证电路变换以减小电路尺寸;（2）合成针对硬件特定约束和噪声特性定制的电路映射器以增加量子电路的保真度;以及（3）使量子电路适应硬件特性变化的有效运行时框架。该项目通过利用为传统程序综合和优化问题设计的丰富工具集开发新颖的电路优化方法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Quantum computers can enable advances in quantum physics, chemistry, material design, optimization, machine learning, and beyond. Today, scientists and engineers around the world are racing to build larger, more-reliable quantum computers and demonstrate their effectiveness at evaluating increasingly complex quantum programs (circuits). Unfortunately, although computationally powerful, quantum computers are fundamentally noisy, and mitigating noise is the primary hurdle in unlocking the true potential of quantum computers. This project focuses on the circuit compiler, which optimizes a quantum circuit and maps the circuit to a physical quantum computer. Given the small size of current and future quantum computers and the noisiness of their computation, careful compilation is essential to produce accurate and reliable results on quantum computers. This project's novelties are twofold- the use of synthesis frameworks to automatically generate parts of the quantum compiler and adaptive runtime that tailor quantum circuits to enable higher reliability. The project's impacts are the development of compiler tools that a broad community of researchers can leverage to program, benchmark, and optimize quantum computing systems.Currently, the state of quantum hardware is in flux, there are many physical realizations of quantum computers, and physicists constantly experiment with novel devices and architectures. For every new physical substrate and every modification of a computer, one needs to modify or rewrite major compiler pieces to run experiments. This project aims to create a framework to automatically synthesize a quantum circuit optimizer, mapper, and runtime system as per the hardware constraints. It focuses on three thrusts: (1) automatic discovery and verification of circuit transformations to reduce circuit size; (2) synthesis of circuit mappers tailored to hardware-specific constraints and noise characteristics to increase the fidelity of quantum circuits; and (3) an efficient runtime framework that adapts the quantum circuits to the changes in hardware characteristics. This project develops novel circuit optimization methods by leveraging a rich set of tools designed for conventional program synthesis and optimization problems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.