Integration of Quantum Accelerators into HPC: Toward a Unified Quantum Platform

TL;DR

This paper develops a unified quantum platform that integrates quantum accelerators into HPC systems, focusing on a common interface, runtime, and micro-architecture to enable scalable and efficient quantum-HPC workflows.

Contribution

It introduces a platform-agnostic quantum control processor micro-architecture, a unified runtime library, and an extended instruction set architecture for seamless integration of quantum hardware into HPC.

Findings

The runtime library bridges quantum programming standards with a unified ISA.

The platform extension supports multiple quantum hardware technologies.

Performance analysis shows scalable execution time and memory requirements.

Abstract

To harness the power of quantum computing (QC) in the near future, tight and efficient integration of QC with high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure (both on the software (SW) and the hardware (HW) level) is crucial. This paper addresses the development of a unified quantum platform (UQP) and how it is being integrated into the HPC ecosystem. It builds on the concepts of hybrid high performance computing - quantum computing (HPCQC) workflows and a unified HPCQC toolchain, introduced in our previous work and makes the next needed step: it unifies the low-level interface between the existing classical HPC systems and the emerging quantum hardware technologies, including but not limited to machines based on superconducting qubits, neutral atoms or trapped ions. The UQP consists of three core components: a runtime library, an instruction set architecture (ISA) and a quantum control processor (QCP) micro-architecture. In particular, this work contributes a unified HPCQC runtime library that bridges the gap between programming systems built on quantum intermediate representation (QIR) standard with a novel, unified hybrid ISA. It then introduces the initial extension of an ISA and QCP micro-architecture to be platform and technology agnostic and enables it as an efficient execution platform. The UQP has been verified to ensure correctness. Further, our performance analysis shows that the execution time and memory requirements of the runtime library scale super-linearly with number of qubits, which is critical to support scalability efforts in QC hardware.