Lottery BP: Unlocking Quantum Error Decoding at Scale

TL;DR

This paper introduces Lottery BP, a novel quantum error decoder that significantly improves accuracy and scalability for fault-tolerant quantum computing, supported by a new architecture and simulation framework.

Contribution

It proposes Lottery BP, a randomized decoder that enhances accuracy, a scalable architecture PolyQec, and a flexible simulation tool Syndrilla for quantum error correction evaluation.

Findings

Lottery BP improves decoding accuracy by 2~8 orders of magnitude.

PolyQec reduces reliance on global decoding, increasing scalability by 3~5 orders of magnitude.

Syndrilla accelerates simulation speed by 1~2 orders of magnitude on GPUs.

Abstract

To enable fault tolerance on millions of qubits in real time, scalable decoding is necessary, which motivates this paper. Existing decoding algorithms (decoders), such as clustering, matching, belief propagation (BP), and neural networks, suffer from one or more of inaccuracy, costliness, and incompatibility, upon a broad set of quantum error correction codes, such as surface code, toric code, and bivariate bicycle code. Therefore, there exists a gap between existing decoders and an ideal decoder that is accurate, fast, general, and scalable simultaneously. This paper contributes in three aspects, including decoder, decoder architecture, and decoding simulator. First, we propose Lottery BP, a decoder that introduces randomness during decoding. Lottery BP improves the decoding accuracy over BP by 2~8 orders of magnitude for topological codes. To efficiently decode multi-round measurement errors, we propose syndrome vote as a pre-processing step before Lottery BP, which compresses multiple rounds of syndromes into one. Syndrome vote increases the latency margin of decoding and mitigates the backlog problem. Second, we design a PolyQec architecture that implements Lottery BP as a local decoder and ordered statistics decoding (OSD) as a global decoder, and it is configurable for surface/toric code and X/Z check. Since Lottery BP boosts the local decoding accuracy, PolyQec invokes the costly global OSD decoder less frequently over BP+OSD to enhance the scalability, e.g., 3~5 orders of magnitude less for topological codes. Third, to evaluate decoders fairly, we develop a PyTorch-based decoding simulator, Syndrilla, that modularizes the simulation pipeline and allows to extend new decoders flexibly. We formulate multiple metrics to quantify the performance of decoders and integrate them in Syndrilla. Running on GPUs, Syndrilla is 1~2 orders of magnitude faster than CPUs.