DOE OSTI2023
Near-term intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) de- vices are subject to considerable noise and short coherence time. Consequently, it is critical to minimize circuit execution latency. Traditionally, each basis gate of a transpiled circuit is decoded into a fixed episode of the device control pulses. Recently, people started to investigate merged pulse generation for customized gates through quantum optimal control (QOC). However, existing QOC approaches face the challenges of (i) restricted search space due to prohibitive compilation overhead; (ii) suboptimal end-to-end performance due to aggressive local optimization and falsely introduced dependency among the customized gates; (iii) inadequate adaptivity towards system calibration, which is critical for NISQ devices. In this work, we propose PAQOC, a novel QOC framework that can (i) automatically detect frequently encountered gate patterns in the logical circuit by modeling the problem as a subgraph mining process and reuse these patterns to enable much larger search space exploration (i.e., program aware); (ii) systemically construct customized gate-set based on the impact to the overall program latency (i.e., criticality-aware); and (iii) quickly adapt to system re-calibration thanks to the small-scale pattern-based gate generation (i.e., adaptivity-aware). PAQOC achieves a good tradeoff between circuit performance and compilation time, allowing fully automatic, single stop, ad- hoc customized pulse generation for more efficient execution of user programs on NISQ devices. Evaluations using fifteen applications show that PAQOC can achieve on average 1.95× speedup of the circuit latency and achieve on average 36.7% reduction in compilation overhead. With PAQOC, circuits can run faster with reduced noise, allowing deeper circuits to be tested within the coherence time of present NISQ platforms.