Optimizing Quantum Programs against Decoherence: Delaying Qubits into
  Quantum Superposition
Quantum computing technology has reached a second renaissance in the last
decade. However, in the NISQ era pointed out by John Preskill in 2018, quantum
noise and decoherence, which affect the accuracy and execution effect of
quantum programs, cannot be ignored and corrected by the near future NISQ
computers. In order to let users more easily write quantum programs, the
compiler and runtime system should consider underlying quantum hardware
features such as decoherence. To address the challenges posed by decoherence,
in this paper, we propose and prototype QLifeReducer to minimize the qubit
lifetime in the input OpenQASM program by delaying qubits into quantum
superposition. QLifeReducer includes three core modules, i.e.,the parser,
parallelism analyzer and transformer. It introduces the layered bundle format
to express the quantum program, where a set of parallelizable quantum
operations is packaged into a bundle. We evaluate quantum programs before and
after transformed by QLifeReducer on both real IBM Q 5 Tenerife and the
self-developed simulator. The experimental results show that QLifeReducer
reduces the error rate of a quantum program when executed on IBMQ 5 Tenerife by
11%; and can reduce the longest qubit lifetime as well as average qubit
lifetime by more than 20% on most quantum workloads.
Yu Zhang Haowei Deng Quanxi Li Haoze Song Leihai Nie