Special Seminar: Alexandru Paler "A Real-time and Reliable Operating System for Quantum Computers"

A Real-time and Reliable Operating System for Quantum Computers

Alexandru Paler
Johannes Kepler University & Transilvania University

Friday, 12 March at 13:00
via Zoom: request the link by email [email protected]
Note! the link will be sent to the CS staff separately every day.

Abstract: Reliable quantum computers (RQCs) are expected to solve difficult practical problems such as quantum chemistry, but it was early recognized that quantum hardware is highly susceptible to noise. Quantum error-correcting codes are a necessity to guarantee reliable quantum computations, and may require millions of hardware qubits for computations of practical interest. There is a huge gap between the current quantum computers with hundreds of qubits and the million qubits required. Executing the first computation requires integrating the hardware but also improving the resource efficiency of the quantum algorithms. Resource bottlenecks in quantum algorithms are critical to the feasibility of practical quantum computing.

Google’s quantum supremacy demonstration pitted the world’s largest supercomputer against a single quantum chip. A path to further scale up may involve a large supercomputer working together with quantum chips, instead of in competition with them. A realistic approach could be to design and implement the control of RQCs as a quantum operating system (QCOS), based on message passing, executed on supercomputers.

In this talk, I will describe the methods and tools I have been researching and developing for analyzing, compiling, optimizing, and executing error-corrected quantum computations. The medium-term goal is to use these tools during the execution of the first computations. I will detail the interactions existing in the QCOS.

Even in the absence of large scale quantum computers, the QCOS can be used to identify the bottlenecks and to estimate the real resources required for running the first error-corrected quantum computation. The pedagogical aspect of the QCOS will be presented in conjunction with my activity with respect to increasing the awareness and literacy regarding the realities of practical quantum computations.

Bio: He obtained his PhD from the University of Passau, Germany, and is with the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria and the Transilvania University, Brasov, Romania. He was the PI of a Linz Institute of Technology project focusing on quantum computer control software, and was the recipient of the 2019, 2020 Google Faculty Research Awards. In 2020 he was the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Researcher fellowship, and was Visiting Researcher at University of Texas at Dallas. He was quantum computing practice program manager for Google Munich. He is the recipient of a best paper award and reviewed for various journals (APS, SpringerNature, IEEE, ACM, Elsevier) and was in the TPC of multiple conferences and workshops. He is active in the open source quantum software community. His research focuses on compiling and optimising large scale quantum circuits. Since 2019, he is the co-organizer and chair of the Quantum Resource Estimation Workshop organized at ISCA.