Modular Software for Real-Time Quantum Control Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a modular design for real-time quantum control software that enhances flexibility and portability, significantly reducing execution overhead and enabling shared code across different quantum systems.

Contribution

The paper introduces a systematic modular architecture for quantum control software, improving performance and portability compared to existing system-specific solutions.

Findings

Reduced kernel execution time overhead by 63.3% on average

Shared between 49.8% and 91.0% of code statements across systems

Successfully demonstrated portability with randomized benchmarking on two ion-trap systems

Abstract

Real-time control software and hardware is essential for operating quantum computers. In particular, the software plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between quantum programs and the quantum system. Unfortunately, current control software is often optimized for a specific system at the cost of flexibility and portability. We propose a systematic design strategy for modular real-time quantum control software and demonstrate that modular control software can reduce the execution time overhead of kernels by 63.3% on average while not increasing the binary size. Our analysis shows that modular control software for two distinctly different systems can share between 49.8% and 91.0% of covered code statements. To demonstrate the modularity and portability of our software architecture, we run a portable randomized benchmarking experiment on two different ion-trap quantum systems.