A Cross-Platform Execution Engine for the Quantum Intermediate Representation

TL;DR

This paper introduces QIR-EE, a versatile execution engine that interprets and runs quantum intermediate representation programs across various hardware platforms, enabling flexible hybrid quantum-classical computing.

Contribution

The paper presents QIR-EE, a novel LLVM-based engine supporting cross-platform execution of quantum programs with customizable runtime and hardware integration.

Findings

Successfully executed quantum programs on IonQ, Quantinuum, and IBM hardware.

Demonstrated efficient handling of mixed quantum and classical instructions.

Validated the flexibility and extensibility of the QIR-EE architecture.

Abstract

Hybrid languages like the quantum intermediate representation (QIR) are essential for programming systems that mix quantum and conventional computing models, while execution of these programs is often deferred to a system-specific implementation. Here, we develop the QIR Execution Engine (QIR-EE) for parsing, interpreting, and executing QIR across multiple hardware platforms. QIR-EE uses LLVM to execute hybrid instructions specifying quantum programs and, by design, presents extension points that support customized runtime and hardware environments. We demonstrate an implementation that uses the XACC quantum hardware-accelerator library to dispatch prototypical quantum programs on different commercial quantum platforms and numerical simulators, and we validate execution of QIR-EE on IonQ, Quantinuum, and IBM hardware. Our results highlight the efficiency of hybrid executable architectures for handling mixed instructions, managing mixed data, and integrating with quantum computing frameworks to realize cross-platform execution.