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

量子计算机可以推动量子物理、化学、材料设计、优化、机器学习等领域的进步。今天，世界各地的科学家和工程师都在竞相建造更大、更可靠的量子计算机，并展示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，尽管量子计算机的计算能力很强，但它从根本上是有噪声的，而减轻噪声是释放量子计算机真正潜力的主要障碍。本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小尺寸及其计算的噪声，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。这个项目的新颖之处在于两个方面——使用合成框架来自动生成量子编译器的部分，以及定制量子电路以实现更高可靠性的自适应运行时。该项目的影响是编译器工具的开发，广泛的研究人员社区可以利用这些工具来编程、基准测试和优化量子计算系统。目前，量子硬件的状态处于不断变化之中，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板和每一个计算机的修改，人们都需要修改或重写主要的编译器来运行实验。本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。它侧重于三个重点：(1)电路转换的自动发现和验证，以减小电路尺寸；(2)根据硬件特定约束和噪声特性合成电路映射器，以提高量子电路的保真度；(3)一个有效的运行时框架，使量子电路适应硬件特性的变化。该项目开发了新颖的电路优化方法，利用一套丰富的工具，为传统的程序综合和优化问题而设计。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 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.