A Practical Quantum Instruction Set Architecture

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical quantum instruction set architecture and a quantum instruction language, Quil, enabling explicit programming, compilation, and implementation of quantum algorithms on a formal machine model.

Contribution

It introduces a formal quantum instruction set architecture and Quil language, facilitating portable and explicit descriptions of quantum algorithms for emerging quantum hardware.

Findings

Implementation of the quantum instruction set architecture

Demonstration of non-trivial algorithms targeting the architecture

Compatibility with ongoing quantum hardware development

Abstract

We introduce an abstract machine architecture for classical/quantum computations---including compilation---along with a quantum instruction language called Quil for explicitly writing these computations. With this formalism, we discuss concrete implementations of the machine and non-trivial algorithms targeting them. The introduction of this machine dovetails with ongoing development of quantum computing technology, and makes possible portable descriptions of recent classical/quantum algorithms.