Automatic Compilation for Portable and Scalable Quantum Software

Noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processors are becoming larger (20–150 qubits) and more expressive (e.g., supporting a plurality of two-qubit interactions). However, since NISQ processors are error-prone, there is a great disparity between those programs which are desirable to write and those which execute reliably. Together, these aspects make it difficult to write quantum programs which are both portable (i.e., readily executable on different devices) and efficient (i.e., produce more accurate results using fewer resources). We discuss how automatic compilation helps achieve these simultaneous goals more consistently, and compare results of an open-source, extensible automatic compiler quilc to semi-manual counterparts.