Tutorial: Grand Challenges and Research Tools for Quantum Computing
EPiQC has presented a series of tutorials to introduce the computer science community and others to quantum computing. Tutorials which have reached hundreds were presented at: ISCA 2018 (Grand Challenges and Research Tools for Quantum Computing), Design, Automation, and test in europe (DAte2019), MICRO 51, the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC), and the Ontario Science Center. Videos and slides are available below.
Links to software installation (instructions + script) are below. The Docker + Docker image file size is ~7GB.
ISCA 2018 videos Playlist available on Youtube
Slides (PDF) & videos available below
Intro and Research Challenges (slides) (Fred Chong) (video)
Tools for QC Arch Research (slides) (Margaret Martonosi) (video)
Introduction to Quantum Computing (Diana Franklin) (video)
Quantum Information and Quantum Programming (slides) (Ali Javadi-Abhari) (video)
Experiment with Basic Algorithms (Ali Javadi-Abhari) (video)
Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithms (slides) (Peter Shor) (video)
Quantum Chemistry Algorithms (slides) (Ken Brown) (video)
Experiment with Chemistry Demo (Pranav Gokhale) (video)
Intro to Quantum Error Correction and Challenges (Andrew Cross) (video)
Workshop Description: Quantum computing is at an inflection point, where 72-qubit (quantum bit) machines have been built, 100-qubit machines are just around the corner, and even 1000-qubit machines are perhaps only a few years away. These machines have the potential to fundamentally change our concept of what is computable and demonstrate practical applications in areas such as quantum chemistry, optimization, and quantum simulation.
Yet a significant resource gap remains between practical quantum algorithms and near-term machines. Software and architectures are what are needed to increase the efficiency of algorithms and machines and close this gap. There is a urgent shortage of the necessary computer scientists to work on closing this gap (there are over 60 public and private companies trying to hire in this area).
This workshop will outline the grand research challenges in closing this gap, including programming language design, software and hardware verification, defining and perforating abstraction boundaries, cross-layer optimization, managing parallelism and communication, mapping and scheduling computations, reducing control complexity, machine-specific optimizations, and many more. Some of these challenges can be approached with minimal quantum computing background and some will require greater depth.
We will introduce the basic concepts and resources to enable researchers to begin to delve into these challenges. We will also introduce quantum algorithms of near-term significance.
Finally, we will provide an overview and hands-on experience with an end-to-end set of software tools from a high-level programming language to running experiments on cloud-access IBM quantum machines. These tools will be a combination of the Scaffold Quantum Programming Language/Compiler and the IBM QISkit tools and interfaces.
This workshop will be highly interactive. Participants will install our tools and work with code examples running on real quantum hardware at IBM, all organized within Jupyter notebooks, throughout the afternoon.
