Compiling Fault-Tolerant Quantum Programs with Lattice Surgery

Abstract

Our project, the Lattice Surgery Compiler (LSC) aims to build a compiler that translates quantum programs, expressed as quantum circuits, to a format designed to express error corrected computations. As output of the compiler, we target a set of instructions known as lattice surgery. Lattice surgery is a way of manipulating a very large lattice of quantum units (qubits) arranged so that the computation content is more resistant to errors.

Building this compiler presented us with scientific and engineering challenges. We use results from the field of quantum information to process the computation, we solve technical problems such as parsing the assembly language of quantum programs and deal with the engineering challenge of putting together a complex compilation pipeline. Finally, aiming to make our project accessible to a wide audience of researchers, we save users the trouble of installing the large software stack needed to run the compiler by hosting it as website at https://latticesurgery.com.

Faculty Supervisor:
Dr. Steven Pearce, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University

Research Team Members:
Hoi-Kwan Lau, Department of Physics and Alex Nguyen, Simon Fraser University