Automatic architecture design for distributed quantum computing

In distributed quantum computing (DQC), quantum hardware design mainly focuses on providing as many as possible high-quality inter-chip connections. Meanwhile, quantum software tries its best to reduce the required number of remote quantum gates between chips. However, this “hardware first, software follows” methodology may not fully exploit the potential of DQC. Inspired by classical software-hardware co-design, this paper explores the design space of application-specific DQC architectures. More specifically, we propose AutoArch, an automated quantum chip network (QCN) structure design tool. With qubits grouping followed by a customized QCN design, AutoArch can generate a near-optimal DQC architecture suitable for target quantum algorithms. Experimental results show that the DQC architecture generated by AutoArch can outperform other general QCN architectures when executing target quantum algorithms.