Introduction to the Special Issue on Software Tools for Quantum Computing: Part 1

Abstract

Quantum computing is emerging as a remarkable technology that offers the possibility of achieving major scientific breakthroughs in many areas. By leveraging the unique features of quantum mechanics, quantum computers may be instrumental in advancing many areas, including science, energy, defense, medicine, and finance. This includes solving complex problems whose solution lies well beyond the capacity of contemporary and even future supercomputers that are based on conventional computing technologies. As a foundation for future generations of computing and information processing, quantum computing represents an exciting area for developing new ideas in computer science and computational engineering. Interacting with the emerging capabilities of quantum computers, including noisy-intermediate scale quantum devices, for both basic and applied research will require an end-to-end software stack, not unlike the one we rely on in classical computing. This quantum software stack plays an important role in the quantum computing ecosystem, providing quantum practitioners with the essential tools to take advantage of the quantum revolution. Critical components of a quantum software stack include programming models and languages, compilers, verification, and debugging tools, and hardware control capabilities. While advances are being made by the community, we are still far off from providing quantum practitioners with a cohesive software toolchain. Over the last few years, there has been considerable effort to develop software tools that make quantum computing technology more accessible to the broader community. Many of those developed by industry, national laboratories, and academia are being made available as open-source software tools. Programming languages are being developed that make it easier for domain scientists to translate their science onto quantum computers. Similar to classical computing, compilers have been developed with the aim of minimizing the resource needs with respect to the number of quantum processing units (qubits, qutrits, etc.) and the number of quantum operations that need to be performed. To aid in the development and testing of new algorithms, scalable numerical simulators and resource profilers have been developed, which form a critical component of the quantum computing software ecosystem. Only recently, approaches and tools have been developed for verifying, validating, and debugging quantum computer programs and quantum computer hardware. Finally, operating on quantum computers requires a quantum control software toolset that is likely to be hardware-technology specific. Continued research and development of a broad and open-source collection of software tools and techniques will be critical to enabling the broad adoption of quantum computing in research and industry. The purpose of this special issue is to present recent research and development accomplishments resulting in the implementation and availability of new quantum computing software tools that will make quantum computing more practical and accessible. We hope that this special issue