On June 27, in Porto, together with Politecnico di Torino, Kent State University, and Northeastern University we organize the “Quantum Computing Reliability: Problems, Tools, and Potential Solutions” tutorial at the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks 2023. The talk wil be held in the Presidente room from 14:00 to 18:30.
Quantum computing is a new computational paradigm, expected to revolutionize the computing field in the next few years. Qubits, the atomic units of a quantum circuit, exploit the quantum physics properties to increase the parallelism and speed of computation. Unfortunately, qubits are both intrinsically noisy and highly susceptible to external sources of faults, such as ionizing radiation. The latest discoveries highlight a much higher radiation sensitivity of qubits than traditional transistors and identify a much more complex fault model than bit-flip. The observed error rate is so high that researchers are questioning the large-scale adoption of quantum computers. The reliability and dependability community is asked to act to find innovative solutions to improve the reliability of quantum applications. This tutorial aims at providing the DSN community with the tools to do so and to train the attendees on quantum fault injection.
This tutorial provides the audience with all information and background needed to understand quantum computing basics, to design a quantum circuit, to simulate a quantum execution, and to understand the obtained result. We treat quantum computing as an operative computing architecture, focusing on its utilization rather than on its physical and tech- nological implementation. Then, we will present the available correction codes and the open challenges that the reliability community is asked to address. The tutorial considers both the intrinsic noise, that has a predictable and incremental effect, and radiation-induced transient faults, that are stochastic and modify the qubit in an unpredictable way.
After completing the overview of available technology and of the open challenges, this tutorial presents, with an hands- on session that include examples of utilization, the Quantum Fault Injector (QuFI) framework. QuFI is an easy-to-use fault injector able to identify the quantum circuits sensitivity to faults and the probability for a fault in a qubit to propagate to the output. Based on the latest studies and radiation experi- ments performed on real quantum machines, QuFI models the transient faults in a qubit as a phase shift with a parametrized magnitude. QuFI is highly flexible, as it can be used on both quantum circuit simulators and real quantum machines. As we show, this framework allows to choose any quantum algorithm to be analyzed, and it is possible to identify the faults and qubits that are more likely to impact its output.
