Extending Python for Quantum-classical Computing via Quantum Just-in-time Compilation

• Published in: ACM transactions on quantum computing (Print) 2022-07, Vol.3 (4), p.1-25, Article 24
• Main Authors: Nguyen, Thien, McCaskey, Alexander J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Compilers; Hardware; Quantum computation; Software and its engineering
• ISSN: 2643-6809; 2643-6817
• DOI: 10.1145/3544496

Python is a popular programming language known for its flexibility, usability, readability, and focus on developer productivity. The quantum software community has adopted Python on a number of large-scale efforts due to these characteristics, as well as the remote nature of near-term quantum processors. The use of Python has enabled quick prototyping for quantum code that directly benefits pertinent research and development efforts in quantum scientific computing. However, this rapid prototyping ability comes at the cost of future performant integration for tightly coupled CPU-QPU architectures with fast-feedback. Here, we present a language extension to Python that enables heterogeneous quantum-classical computing via a robust C++ infrastructure for quantum just-in-time (QJIT) compilation. Our work builds off the QCOR C++ language extension and compiler infrastructure to enable a single-source, quantum hardware-agnostic approach to quantum-classical computing that retains the performance required for tightly coupled CPU-QPU compute models. We detail this Python extension, its programming model and underlying software architecture, and provide a robust set of examples to demonstrate the utility of our approach.