Towards fault-tolerant distributed quantum computation (FT-DQC): Taxonomy, recent progress, and challenges

Abstract

As the works on quantum computing have seen substantial development in recent years, we are on the verge of seeing the fruitful result of the preliminary, early version of quantum computers. Nevertheless, in order to achieve full-fledged, large-scale quantum computers, two aspects still lacking in the existing quantum computers, i.e., scalability and reliability, will need to be more carefully considered and investigated. In this survey, we present a review of existing literature that aims to alleviate the scalability and reliability issues in quantum computers. In particular, we discuss how existing research leads to two main solutions: for advancing scalability, a distributed quantum computing (DQC) paradigm will be the primary direction instead of the general centralized quantum computing (CQC), whereas for attaining reliability, a fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) approach would need to be leveraged instead of the existing noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers (NISQ). Combining both solutions, we highlight the essentiality of fault-tolerant distributed quantum computation (FT-DQC) and present related progress in the field. Furthermore, from the papers that we have gathered, we provide the taxonomy of the works to give a clearer landscape of the field and discuss the key issues in realizing FT-DQC.