Software-Hardware Co-Optimization for Computational Chemistry on Superconducting Quantum Processors

Understand

Computational chemistry is the leading application to demonstrate the advantage of quantum computing in the near term.

• However, large-scale simulation of chemical systems on quantum computers is currently hindered due to a mismatch between the computational resource needs of the program and those available in today's technology.
• In this paper we argue that significant new optimizations can be discovered by co-designing the application, compiler, and hardware.
• We show that multiple optimization objectives can be coordinated through the key abstraction layer of Pauli strings, which are the basic building blocks of computational chemistry programs.