IBM Research Award - 2023 - Giulia Meuli

For her outstanding doctoral work in the field of quantum computing and quantum compilation, combining electronic design automation (EDA) algorithms and quantum computing techniques to achieve an open-source design platform.

Practical realizations of quantum computers are poised to deliver outstanding computational capabilities far beyond the reach of any classical supercomputer. Among the software resources required to operate such systems, quantum compilers translate a high-level description of a quantum algorithm into low-level, technology-dependent instructions.

The thesis focuses on the compilation of quantum circuits that perform Boolean functions, required by many quantum algorithms, e.g., Shor’s, into a fault-tolerant set of instructions. I present compilation and optimization algorithms that minimize their resource footprint and explore the trade-off between memory and operations typical of compilation processes. The researched algorithms leverage data structures and techniques adapted from classical logic synthesis and are open-source.

The second topic of the thesis is automatic accuracy management for quantum programming language compilers. A general methodology is presented, that allows to perform resource estimation taking approximation errors into account and applies to any programming language.

The algorithms and the methodologies presented in this thesis are part of a widespread effort of the research community to build a complete and efficient software stack to program the first practical universal quantum computer.