Computer scientists at UCLA have shown that existing compilers, which tell quantum computers how to use their circuits to execute quantum programs, inhibit the computers’ ability to achieve optimal performance.
Specifically, their research has revealed that improving quantum compilation design could help achieve computation speeds up to 45 times faster than currently demonstrated.
The team created a family of benchmark quantum circuits with known optimal depths or sizes. They tested their benchmarks in three of the most used quantum compilation tools: Cirq from Google, Qiskit from IBM, tket from Cambridge Quantum Computing.
They also proved the NP-completeness of the layout synthesis problem for quantum computing.
They have made the benchmarks, named QUEKO, open source and available on the software repository GitHub.
The research has been published in IEEE Transactions on Computer.