Abstract
Hybrid languages like the quantum intermediate representation (QIR) are essential for programming systems that mix quantum and conventional computing models, while execution of these programs is often deferred to a system-specific implementation. Here, we develop the QIR Execution Engine (QIR-EE) for parsing, interpreting, and executing QIR across multiple hardware platforms. QIR-EE uses LLVM to execute hybrid instructions specifying quantum programs and, by design, presents extension points that support customized runtime and hardware environments. We demonstrate an implementation that uses the XACC quantum hardware-accelerator library to dispatch prototypical quantum programs on different commercial quantum platforms and numerical simulators, and we validate execution of QIR-EE on IonQ, Quantinuum, and IBM hardware. Our results highlight the efficiency of hybrid executable architectures for handling mixed instructions, managing mixed data, and integrating with quantum computing frameworks to realize cross-platform execution.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1521 |
| Journal | Journal of Supercomputing |
| Volume | 81 |
| Issue number | 16 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 2025 |
Funding
Support for this work came from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research Accelerated Research in Quantum Computing Program under field work proposal ERKJ332. We acknowledge the use of resources of the Quantum Computing User Program, which is managed by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725.
Keywords
- Compiler
- Intermediate representation
- LLVM
- Quantum computing
- Software stack