CAREER: Qurious: Methods for Making Erroneous Near-term Quantum Computers More Usable

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

Quantum computing offers exceptional promise for transformative discoveries in many scientific and business domains, including drug discovery, cybersecurity, manufacturing, financial services — realizing this potential requires urgent research efforts toward making quantum computing technology more usable and mature quickly, and developing a capable STEM workforce with strong technical skills in quantum computing. Unfortunately, existing quantum computing machines, widely known as Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) machines, are highly error-prone and expected to remain to be reliability-constrained in the future. When computational scientists execute their applications on NISQ machines, they receive erroneous and noisy program outputs. The promise of exponential speedups by quantum computers is not meaningful if the end-users cannot infer the correct program output after executing their programs on these machines. Therefore, this project, Qurious (pronounced as "curious"), aims to design and develop a robust system software ecosystem for quantum computers to help quantum programmers make meaningful interpretations of noisy and erroneous runs on quantum computers. The methods, developed in this project, will mitigate the side-effects of errors on quantum computers, and hence, enable high-performance computing (HPC) programmers to leverage quantum computers for solving computationally challenging problems of societal importance. This project will help HPC programmers scale their programs on larger quantum machines, and exploit the heterogeneity among quantum machines in terms of resilience characteristics on quantum cloud computing platforms, to make program outputs less noisy and more reliable. This project aims to prepare a diverse and competitive STEM workforce with quantum computing skills to achieve economic competitiveness in the quantum-enabled future and leverage the transformative changes quantum computing will bring to society. This project devises a novel three-pronged education and outreach plan. The first step aims to raise curiosity and elevate excitement about quantum computing at an early stage (e.g., high school students). Then, at the next stage (i.e., undergraduate level), this excitement is converted into the development of quantum-style thinking. At the next educational stage (i.e., graduate students), the students are provided technical expertise for efficiently managing quantum computing resources under reliability constraints — leveraging the research advances and outcomes achieved in this project. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.