High-Level Programming of the Quantinuum Helios Processor

While there are existing high-level languages for quantum computing--there are typically limitations in the high-level programming features that can be used when targeting physical hardware instead of quantum simulators. Quantinuum Helios has a new state-of-the-art programming language and compiler stack that were co-designed to take the programming model from authoring quantum circuits to authoring high-level quantum programs. Importantly, a new programming language, Guppy, delivers full feature parity across both physical QPU and software emulation execution environments. Additionally, these language features come with no loss of performance with respect to on-device execution. This mix of programmability and high-performance is enabled by a new LLVM based compiler stack and control system software environment that powers a new runtime/virtual machine.