Abstract: Quantum hardware is experiencing a boon leading to more chip variety and configurations with higher fidelities. While ultimately, this will translate to a boon for the entire field of quantum computing, it presents a software design problem by placing more of the overall burden of realizing end-to-end quantum applications on the software stacks, specifically the quantum compiler. The Berkeley Quantum Synthesis Toolkit (BQSKit) is a powerful and portable quantum compiler framework with a proven ability to alleviate this issue and translate recent hardware successes up to the algorithm level. BQSKit achieves superior portability and optimization potential by utilizing a parameterized quantum circuit intermediate representation to facilitate numerical instantiation. In this talk, I first introduce the idea of numerical instantiation and BQSKit compilation, including algorithms and workflows for transpiling circuits to any hardware, even ones with heterogeneous gate sets or higher-level qudits (qutrits). I then detail several further practical use cases, such as error mitigation techniques with approximations and algorithm-hardware design exploration.

Short Bio: Ed is a computer systems engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with extensive experience developing and implementing advanced algorithms for quantum compilation, such as QFAST and Qfactor. He is currently the principal engineer on the BQSKit project and has research interests in quantum synthesis, compilation, and software systems.