AutoComm: A Framework for Enabling Efficient Communication in Distributed Quantum Programs

Distributed quantum computing (DQC) is a promising approach to extending the computational power of near-term quantum hardware. However, the non-local quantum communication between quantum nodes is much more expensive and error-prone than the local quantum operation within each quantum device. Previous DQC compilers focus on optimizing the implementation of each non-local gate and adopt similar compilation designs to single-node quantum compilers. The communication patterns in distributed quantum programs remain unexplored, leading to a far-from-optimal communication cost. In this paper, we identify burst communication, a specific qubit-node communication pattern that widely exists in various distributed quantum programs and can be leveraged to guide communication overhead optimization. We then propose AutoComm, an automatic compiler framework to extract burst communication patterns from input programs and then optimize the communication steps of burst communication discovered. Compared to state-of-the-art DQC compilers, experimental results show that our proposed AutoComm can reduce the communication resource consumption and the program latency by 72.9% and 69.2% on average, respectively.

分布式量子计算（DQC）是一种很有前景的方法，可用于扩展近期量子硬件的计算能力。然而，量子节点之间的非局域量子通信比每个量子设备内的局域量子操作要昂贵得多，且更容易出错。先前的DQC编译器专注于优化每个非局域门的实现，并采用与单节点量子编译器类似的编译设计。分布式量子程序中的通信模式尚未得到探索，导致通信成本远非最优。在本文中，我们确定了突发通信，这是一种特定的量子比特 - 节点通信模式，广泛存在于各种分布式量子程序中，可用于指导通信开销优化。然后我们提出了AutoComm，这是一个自动编译器框架，用于从输入程序中提取突发通信模式，然后优化所发现的突发通信的通信步骤。与最先进的DQC编译器相比，实验结果表明，我们提出的AutoComm平均可分别将通信资源消耗和程序延迟降低72.9%和69.2%。