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A new - more modern and flexible - implementation of this exact mapping methodology is available in our JKQ quantum circuit mapping tool QMAP.

A tool to map quantum circuits to the IBM QX architecture using the minimal number of SWAP and H operations (developed in C++)

Developers: Robert Wille, Lukas Burgholzer and Alwin Zulehner

For more information, please visit http://iic.jku.at/eda/research/ibm_qx_mapping/

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us via iic_quantum@jku.at or by creating an issue on GitHub.

Overview

The recent progress in the physical realization of quantum computers (the first publicly available ones—IBM’s QX architectures—have been launched in 2017) has motivated research on automatic methods that aid users in running quantum circuits on them. Here, certain physical constraints given by the architectures which restrict the allowed interactions of the involved qubits have to be satisfied.

Thus far, this has been addressed by inserting SWAP and H operations. However, it remains unknown whether existing methods add a minimum number of SWAP and H operations or, if not, how far they are away from that minimum—an NP-complete problem.

This tool addresses this by formulating the mapping task as a symbolic optimization problem that is solved using the Z3 theorem solver. While only applicable for circuits with a small number of qubits, experimental evaluations show that the number of operations added by IBM’s heuristic solution exceeds the lower bound obtained with the proposed approach by more than 100% on average.

Usage

System Requirements

The package has been tested under Linux (Ubuntu 18.10, 64-bit) and should be compatible with any current version of g++/cmake. Additionally the following packages are required:

• The Z3 Theorem Solver: https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3
• qelib.inc Gate Library: included with this package

Build and Run

To build the mapping tool type

mkdir build
cd build 
cmake ..
make -j4
cd ..

It is important to include the qelib1.inc file in the build directory in order to allow the parser to find the gate declarations.

cp ./qelib.inc ./build/

Executing

./build/minimal_ibm_qx_mapping

runs the mapping task for the provided test circuit mapped to IBM's QX4; showing the results for all available strategies.

To run your own computations for mapping to IBM's QX4, either execute

./build/minimal_ibm_qx_mapping <input file>

or specify the filename in main.cpp.

The strategy to use can be configured in main.cpp.

To run the mapping task for a different architecture, specify the architectures' coupling map, as well as the correspondingly required number of SWAP gates for each permutation in main.cpp.

Reference

If you use our mapping algorithm for your research, we would be thankful if you referred to it by citing the following publication:

@inproceedings{wille2019mapping,
    title={Mapping Quantum Circuits to {IBM QX} Architectures Using the Minimal Number of {SWAP} and {H} Operations},
    author={Wille, Robert and Burgholzer, Lukas and Zulehner, Alwin},
    booktitle={Design Automation Conference},
    year={2019}
}