Like classical programs, quantum programs undergo a compilation process from high-level programming language to assembly. However, unlike the classical setting, quantum hardware is controlled via analog pulses. In our work, we optimize the underlying pulse schedule by augmenting the set basis gates to match hardware. Our compiler automatically optimizes user code, which therefore remains hardware-agnostic.
Quantum computers are traditionally operated by programmers at the granularity of a gate-based instruction set. However, the actual device-level control of a quantum computer is performed via analog pulses. We introduce a compiler that exploits direct control at this microarchitectural level to achieve significant improvements for quantum programs. Unlike quantum optimal control, our approach is bootstrapped from existing gate calibrations and the resulting pulses are simple. Our techniques are applicable to any quantum computer and realizable on current devices. We validate our techniques with millions of experimental shots on IBM quantum computers, controlled via the OpenPulse control interface. For representative benchmarks, our pulse control techniques achieve both 1.6x lower error rates and 2x faster execution time, relative to standard gate-based compilation. These improvements are critical in the near-term era of quantum computing, which is bottlenecked by error rates and qubit lifetimes. DOI 10.1109/MICRO50266.2020.00027
P. Gokhale, A. Javadi-Abhari, N. Earnest, Y. Shi and F. T. Chong
