Workshop — EPiQC

DAC 2019, Las Vegas, NV

June 2, 08:00AM-12:00PM

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.

Preliminary Schedule

Slides from previous offering (ISCA 2018) linked below, videos available on Youtube

8:00-8:15 Software Installation
8:15-8:45 Intro and Research Challenges (Fred Chong)
8:45-9:15 Intro to Quantum Information and Basic Algorithms (Diana Franklin)
9:15-9:45 Break and SW Installation
9:45-10:15 Quantum Compilation and Optimization / Code Demo (Ali Javadi-Abhari)
10:15-10:45 Experiment with Basic Algorithms (Ali Javadi-Abhari)
10:45-11:00 Break
11:00-11:30 Quantum Chemistry Algorithms (Pranav Gokhale)
11:30-12:00 Experiment with Chemistry Demo (Pranav Gokhale)

organizers

Ali Javadi-Abhari (IBM Research) -- co-author of the Scaffold compiler and simulation tools for quantum computing and researcher for IBM's QISkit quantum computing tools and cloud access to IBM's prototype machines.
Fred Chong (UChicago) -- co-author of the Scaffold compiler and simulation tools for quantum computing and a synthesis lecture on quantum computing for computer architects.
Diana Franklin (UChicago) -- Education lead of EPiQC. Co-author of the Scaffold compiler and simulation tools for quantum computing.

Teaching Assistants

Pranav Gokhale (UChicago) -- second year PhD student in quantum computer architecture
Xin-Chuan (Ryan) Wu (UChicago) -- third year PhD student in quantum computer architecture