Not All Qubits Are Created Equal: A Case for Variability-Aware Policies for NISQ-Era Quantum Computers
Abstract
Existing and near-term quantum computers are not yet large enough to support fault-tolerance. Such systems with few tens to few hundreds of qubits are termed as Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum computers (NISQ), and these systems can provide benefits for a class of quantum algorithms. In this paper, we study the problems of Qubit-Allocation (mapping of program qubits to machine qubits) and Qubit-Movement (routing qubits from one location to another for entanglement). We observe that there can be variation in the error rates of different qubits and links, which can impact the decisions for qubit movement and qubit allocation. We analyze publicly available characterization data for the IBM-Q20 to quantify the variation and show that there is indeed significant variability in the error rates of the qubits and the links connecting them. We show that the device variability has a significant impact on the overall system reliability. To exploit the variability in error rate, we propose Variation-Aware Qubit Movement (VQM) and Variation-Aware Qubit Allocation (VQA), policies that optimize the movement and allocation of qubits to avoid the weaker qubits and links, and guide more operations towards the stronger qubits and links. Our evaluations, with a simulation-based model of IBM-Q20, show that Variation-Aware policies can improve the system reliability by up to 1.7x. We also evaluate our policies on the IBM-Q5 machine and demonstrate that our proposal significantly improves the reliability of real systems (up to 1.9X).
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Tannu and Qureshi found a noisy system with a few hundred qubits, entitled NISQ, and observed variations in the error rates of different qubits.
“These researchers found a Noisy system with a few hundred qubits, entitled NISQ (Noisy IntermediateScale Quantum computers). Theyobserved variations in the error rates of different qubits [53].”
From Quantum Computing in the Next-Generation Computational Biology Landscape: From Protein Folding to Molecular Dynamics (2024) · cites this paper as [53]
These massive efforts are currently evaluated and verified using randomly selected QC benchmarks, lacking common ground for judicious analysis and fair comparison among each other.
“These massive efort, however, are currently evaluated and veriied using randomly selected QC benchmarks [32, 79, 80, 95, 97, 114, 124ś126], lacking the common ground for judicious analysis and fair comparison among each other.”
From QASMBench: A Low-Level Quantum Benchmark Suite for NISQ Evaluation and Simulation (2023) · cites this paper as [126]
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- Authors
- Tannu, S. S., & Qureshi, M. K.
- Affiliations
- Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-04-04
- Pages
- 987-999
- OpenAlex
- W2930242962
- Cited by
- 306
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 29 · 2025: 46 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 49 · 2022: 49 · 2021: 47 · 2020: 51 · 2019: 9
- FWCI
- 14.92
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Quantum Information and Cryptography
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
- Keywords
- qubit allocation, qubit routing, qubit mapping, NISQ devices, system reliability, entanglement routing, quantum hardware characterization
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