CAREER: Qurious: Methods for Making Erroneous Near-term Quantum Computers More Usable

量子计算为许多科学和商业领域的变革性发现提供了非凡的希望，包括药物发现、网络安全、制造业、金融服务——实现这一潜力需要迫切的研究工作，以使量子计算技术更可用和更快成熟，并培养一支具有强大量子计算技术技能的能干的STEM劳动力。不幸的是，现有的量子计算机器，被广泛称为噪声中尺度量子（NISQ）机器，非常容易出错，并且预计在未来仍将受到可靠性的限制。当计算科学家在NISQ机器上执行他们的应用程序时，他们会收到错误和嘈杂的程序输出。如果最终用户在这些机器上执行程序后不能推断出正确的程序输出，那么量子计算机指数级加速的承诺就没有意义了。因此，这个名为“好奇”（发音为“curious”）的项目旨在为量子计算机设计和开发一个强大的系统软件生态系统，以帮助量子程序员对量子计算机上嘈杂和错误的运行做出有意义的解释。在这个项目中开发的方法将减轻量子计算机错误的副作用，从而使高性能计算（HPC）程序员能够利用量子计算机来解决具有社会重要性的计算挑战性问题。该项目将帮助HPC程序员在更大的量子机器上扩展他们的程序，并利用量子云计算平台上量子机器之间在弹性特性方面的异质性，使程序输出更少噪音，更可靠。该项目旨在培养具有量子计算技能的多样化和有竞争力的STEM劳动力，以在量子赋能的未来实现经济竞争力，并利用量子计算将给社会带来的变革性变化。这个项目设计了一个新颖的三管齐下的教育和推广计划。第一步旨在提高早期阶段（例如高中生）对量子计算的好奇心和兴奋感。然后，在下一阶段（即本科阶段），这种兴奋转化为量子式思维的发展。在下一个教育阶段（即研究生阶段），学生将获得在可靠性约束下有效管理量子计算资源的技术专长-利用本项目取得的研究进展和成果。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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 computing offers exceptional promise for transformative discoveries in many scientific and business domains, including drug discovery, cybersecurity, manufacturing, financial services — realizing this potential requires urgent research efforts toward making quantum computing technology more usable and mature quickly, and developing a capable STEM workforce with strong technical skills in quantum computing. Unfortunately, existing quantum computing machines, widely known as Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) machines, are highly error-prone and expected to remain to be reliability-constrained in the future. When computational scientists execute their applications on NISQ machines, they receive erroneous and noisy program outputs. The promise of exponential speedups by quantum computers is not meaningful if the end-users cannot infer the correct program output after executing their programs on these machines. Therefore, this project, Qurious (pronounced as "curious"), aims to design and develop a robust system software ecosystem for quantum computers to help quantum programmers make meaningful interpretations of noisy and erroneous runs on quantum computers. The methods, developed in this project, will mitigate the side-effects of errors on quantum computers, and hence, enable high-performance computing (HPC) programmers to leverage quantum computers for solving computationally challenging problems of societal importance. This project will help HPC programmers scale their programs on larger quantum machines, and exploit the heterogeneity among quantum machines in terms of resilience characteristics on quantum cloud computing platforms, to make program outputs less noisy and more reliable. This project aims to prepare a diverse and competitive STEM workforce with quantum computing skills to achieve economic competitiveness in the quantum-enabled future and leverage the transformative changes quantum computing will bring to society. This project devises a novel three-pronged education and outreach plan. The first step aims to raise curiosity and elevate excitement about quantum computing at an early stage (e.g., high school students). Then, at the next stage (i.e., undergraduate level), this excitement is converted into the development of quantum-style thinking. At the next educational stage (i.e., graduate students), the students are provided technical expertise for efficiently managing quantum computing resources under reliability constraints — leveraging the research advances and outcomes achieved in this project.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.