Software Mitigation of Crosstalk on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computers

By Prakash Murali, David C. McKay, Margaret Martonosi, Ali Javadi-Abhari. International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2020

302 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Crosstalk is a major source of noise in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) systems and is a fundamental challenge for hardware design. When multiple instructions are executed in parallel, crosstalk between the instructions can corrupt the quantum state and lead to incorrect program execution. Our goal is to mitigate the application impact of crosstalk noise through software techniques. This requires (i) accurate characterization of hardware crosstalk, and (ii) intelligent instruction scheduling to serialize the affected operations. Since crosstalk characterization is computationally expensive, we develop optimizations which reduce the characterization overhead. On 3 20-qubit IBMQ systems, we demonstrate two orders of magnitude reduction in characterization time (compute time on the QC device) compared to all-pairs crosstalk measurements. Informed by these characterization, we develop a scheduler that judiciously serializes high crosstalk instructions balancing the need to mitigate crosstalk and exponential decoherence errors from serialization. On real-system runs on 3 IBMQ systems, our scheduler improves the error rate of application circuits by up to 5.6x, compared to the IBM instruction scheduler and offers near-optimal crosstalk mitigation in practice. In a broader picture, the difficulty of mitigating crosstalk has recently driven QC vendors to move towards sparser qubit connectivity or disabling nearby operations entirely in hardware, which can be detrimental to performance. Our work makes the case for software mitigation of crosstalk errors.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c9ebbc55a0bb80a3ebbbcd258ca7554decbc6ef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Computational Theory and Mathematics

Citations in the corpus

Quantum computing with Qiskit (2024, methodology): “…novel methods for circuit transformation and resource optimization [12, 32, 44, 47, 55, 63, 67, 90, 97, 103], using pulse and timing capabilities for error suppression or enablement of new gates [28, 36, 66, 68, 84, 98], or high-level language design and formal compiler verification [79, 91].”
OpenQASM 3: A Broader and Deeper Quantum Assembly Language (2021, background): “Examples include characterization of decoherence and crosstalk [43], dynamical decoupling [44–46], dynamically corrected gates [47, 48], and gate parallelism or scheduling [49].”
QuantumNAS: Noise-Adaptive Search for Robust Quantum Circuits (2021, background): “Noise-adaptive instruction scheduling and crosstalk mitigation techniques [16], [49] aim to reduce the undesired inter-qubit interference and the circuit depth.”