Computational Performance Bounds Prediction in Quantum Computing With Unstable Noise

Quantum computing has significantly advanced in recent years, boasting devices with hundreds of quantum bits (qubits), hinting at its potential quantum advantage over classical computing. Yet, noise in quantum devices poses significant barriers to realizing this supremacy. Understanding noise’s impact is crucial for reproducibility and application reuse; moreover, the next-generation quantum-centric supercomputing essentially requires efficient and accurate noise characterization to support system management (e.g., job scheduling), where ensuring correct functional performance (i.e., fidelity) of jobs on available quantum devices can even be higher-priority than traditional objectives. However, noise fluctuates over time, even on the same quantum device, which makes predicting the computational bounds for on-the-fly noise is vital. Noisy quantum simulation can offer insights but faces efficiency and scalability issues. In this work, we propose a data-driven workflow, namely, QuBound, to predict computational performance bounds. It decomposes historical performance traces to isolate noise sources and devises a novel encoder to embed circuit and noise information processed by a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. For evaluation, we compare QuBound with a state-of-the-art learning-based predictor, which only generates a single performance value instead of a bound. Experimental results show that the result of the existing approach falls outside of performance bounds, while all predictions from our QuBound with the assistance of performance decomposition better fit the bounds. Moreover, QuBound can efficiently produce practical bounds for various circuits with over 10⁶ speedup over simulation; in addition, the range from QuBound is over 10× narrower than the state-of-the-art analytical approach.