A Language and Hardware Independent Approach to Quantum-Classical Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces XACC, a versatile software framework that enables hardware and language independent quantum acceleration within HPC systems, promoting interoperability and integration across diverse quantum computing models.

Contribution

The paper presents XACC, a novel, hardware- and language-agnostic quantum programming framework with a unified interface and extensible compiler, facilitating quantum acceleration in heterogeneous HPC environments.

Findings

XACC supports multiple quantum hardware types.

It enables compilation and execution of both gate and annealing-based quantum programs.

The framework demonstrates effective integration of quantum acceleration in HPC workflows.

Abstract

Heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) systems offer novel architectures which accelerate specific workloads through judicious use of specialized coprocessors. A promising architectural approach for future scientific computations is provided by heterogeneous HPC systems integrating quantum processing units (QPUs). To this end, we present XACC (eXtreme-scale ACCelerator) --- a programming model and software framework that enables quantum acceleration within standard or HPC software workflows. XACC follows a coprocessor machine model that is independent of the underlying quantum computing hardware, thereby enabling quantum programs to be defined and executed on a variety of QPUs types through a unified application programming interface. Moreover, XACC defines a polymorphic low-level intermediate representation, and an extensible compiler frontend that enables language independent quantum programming, thus promoting integration and interoperability across the quantum programming landscape. In this work we define the software architecture enabling our hardware and language independent approach, and demonstrate its usefulness across a range of quantum computing models through illustrative examples involving the compilation and execution of gate and annealing-based quantum programs.