Quantum DevOps: Towards Reliable and Applicable NISQ Quantum Computing

Abstract

Quantum Computing is emerging as one of the great hopes for boosting current computational resources and enabling the application of ICT for optimizing processes and solving complex and challenging domain specific problems. However, the Quantum Computing technology has not matured to a level where it can provide a clear advantage over high performance computing yet. Towards achieving this "quantum advantage", a larger number of Qubits is required, leading inevitably to a more complex topology of the computing Qubits. This raises additional difficulties with decoherence times and implies higher Qubit error rates. Nevertheless, the current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers can prove useful despite the intrinsic uncertainties on the quantum hardware layer. In order to utilize such error-prone computing resources, various concepts are required to address Qubit errors and to deliver successful computations. In this paper describe and motivate the need for the novel concept of Quantum DevOps. which entails regular checking of the reliability of NISQ Quantum Computing (QC) instances. By means of testing the computational reliability of basic quantum gates and computations (C-NOT, Hadamard, etc.)it consequently estimates the likelihood for a large scale critical computation (e.g. calculating hourly traffic flow models for a city) to provide results of sufficient quality. Following this approach to select the best matching (cloud) QC instance and having it integrated directly with the processes of development, testing and finally the operations of quantum based algorithms and systems enables the Quantum DevOps concept.

Trials and Tribulations of Developing Hybrid Quantum-Classical Microservices Systems

“…To do that, quantum DevOps is starting to emerge. In [39] the author propose a technique to regularly check the reliability of quantum computers. This reliability is the used to estimate if a given hardware will provide results of enough quality and to select the best fitting available hardware to run a quantum service.…”

The Quantum software lifecycle

“…This includes, e.g., the packaging of the quantum application to ship it into the target environment, or its deployment [7]. The required concepts and tools differ from classical DevOps and have to be extended for the quantum computing domain [29]. Section 3.5 presents the operations lifecycle exhaustively.…”

“…Quantum DevOps was proposed by Gheorghe-Pop et al [29], motivating the need to apply the DevOps paradigm in the quantum computing domain. Thereby, they analyze the different phases of the traditional DevOps process and extend them correspondingly.…”

“…Further, the various software artifacts also have to be managed, which is prepared and done in the (iv) operations lifecycle. Thereby, developers and operations personnel should be tightly integrated following the widely used DevOps paradigm [7,29] to enable fast and frequent releases [92]. This is especially important in the quantum computing domain with the rapid development of new quantum computers or software tools, which may require adapting the quantum applications regularly [81].…”

“…After specifying the topology model, the quantum application is packaged as a selfcontained archive [29,47]. Therefore, only a single entity including all dependencies has to be transferred into the target environment for the execution [89].…”