Cost-effective Monitoring of Quantum Software Applications

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Quantum computers need to be equipped with a rich and reliable software stack running on top of them to reach their full potential in solving practical problems. A fundamental question that needs to be answered is how to cost-effectively ensure that quantum software is correct and reliable. Monitoring is essential to verify the quality of software and diagnose software errors. However, monitoring quantum software is unique and challenging. For example, measuring the states of quantum variables (i.e., quantum bits, or qubits) would collapse them into classical bits and destroy their quantum properties such as superposition. Additionally, monitoring a quantum application requires extra computing and storage resources (i.e., qubits and quantum gates that operate on the qubits). As quantum computing resources are and will continue to be very limited in the foreseeable future, it is critical to ensure that monitoring does not introduce too much performance overhead (e.g., extra qubits and operations). This project aims to address these challenges by investigating methods to reliably and cost-effectively monitor the intermediate states of quantum software applications. Our first goal is to design reusable quantum monitoring components that can reliably infer the states of qubits while preserving their fidelity (i.e., minimizing the functional impact of monitoring). Our second goal is to design a framework to optimally instrument the monitoring components into quantum applications to minimize the performance impact of monitoring. The outcomes of this project will provide opportunities to improve the observability of quantum software applications, which will in turn help quantum computing researchers and quantum software developers in Canada understand the runtime behaviors of their applications and effectively locate runtime errors. Our project will play an important part in assuring the quality of quantum software applications and hence, ensuring Canada's advantage in quantum computing.