Quantum computing is one of the most promising technology advances of the latest years. Qubits are highly sensitive to noise, which can make the output useless. Lately, it has been shown that superconducting qubits are extremely susceptible to external sources of faults, such as ionizing radiation. When adopted in large scale, radiation-induced errors are expected to become a serious challenge for qubits reliability. We propose an evaluation of the impact of transient faults in the execution of quantum circuits on superconducting chips. Inspired by the Architectural and Program Vulnerability Factors, widely used for classical computation, we propose the Quantum Vulnerability Factor (QVF) to measure the impact of qubit corruption on the circuit output. We model faults, and design a fault injector, based on the latest studies on real machines and radiation experiments. We report the finding of more than 388,000,000 fault injections, considering single and double faults, on three algorithms, identifying the faults and qubits that are more likely to impact the output. We give guidelines on how to map the qubits in real devices to reduce the output error and to reduce the probability of having a radiation-induced corruption modifying the output. Finally, we compare simulations with experiments on physical quantum computers.

Quantum computing is an up-and-coming technology that is expected to revolutionize the computation paradigm in the next few years. Qubits, the primary computing elements of quantum circuits, exploit the quantum physics proprieties to increase the parallelism and speed of computation drastically. Unfortunately, besides being intrinsically noisy, qubits have also been shown to be 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.We propose a framework to identify the quantum circuits sensitivity to radiation-induced faults and the probability for a fault in a qubit to propagate to the output. Based on the latest studies and radiation experiments performed on real quantum machines, we model the transient faults in a qubit as a phase shift with a parametrized magnitude. Additionally, our framework can inject multiple qubit faults, tuning the phase shift magnitude based on the proximity of the qubit to the particle strike location. As we show in the paper, the proposed fault injector is highly flexible, and it can be used on both quantum circuit simulators and real quantum machines. We report the finding of more than 285, 249, 536 injections on the Qiskit simulator and 53, 248 injections on real IBM machines. We consider three quantum algorithms and identify the faults and qubits that are more likely to impact the output. We also consider the fault propagation dependence on the circuit scale, showing that the reliability profile for some quantum algorithms is scale-dependent, with increased impact from radiation-induced faults as we increase the number of qubits. Finally, we also consider multi qubits faults, showing that they are much more critical than single faults. The fault injector and the data presented in this paper are available in a public repository to allow further analysis.

Over the last couple of years, Quantum Computing (QC) has captured the interest of computer scientists due to the fact of quantum speedup, the possibility of solving NPhard problems, and achieving higher compute power. However, mitigating the impact of the noise inside each quantum device presents an immediate challenge. These changes open up new opportunities to investigate the effect of calibration parameters for individual characteristics of each qubit in a manner of time. In this paper, we investigate the temporal behavior of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers based on calibration data and the characteristics of individual devices. In particular, we collect calibration data of IBM-Q machines over the last two years and compare the quantum error robustness against the processor types, quantum topology, and quantum volumes of the IBM-Q machines.

In this paper, we introduce MARS, a new scheduling system for HPC-cloud infrastructures based on a cost-aware, flexible reinforcement learning approach, which serves as an intermediate layer for next generation HPC-cloud resource manager. MARSensembles the pre-trained models from heuristic workloads and decides on the most cost-effective strategy for optimization. A whole workflow application would be split into several optimizable dependent sub-tasks, then based on the predefined resource management plan, a reward will be generated after executing a scheduled task. Lastly, MARSupdates the Deep Neural Network (DNN) model based on the reward. MARSis designed to optimize the existing models through reinforcement mechanisms. MARSadapts to the dynamics of workflow applications, selects the most cost-effective scheduling solution among pre-built scheduling strategies (backfilling, SJF, etc.) and self-learning deep neural network model at run-time. We evaluate MARSwith different real-world workflow traces. MARS can achieve 5%–60% increased performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Deep neural network powered artificial intelligence has rapidly changed our daily life with various applications. However, as one of the essential steps of deep neural networks, training a heavily-weighted network requires a tremendous amount of computing resources. Especially in the post Moore’s Law era, the limit of semiconductor fabrication technology has restricted the development of learning algorithms to cope with the increasing high intensity training data. Meanwhile, quantum computing has demonstrated its significant potential in terms of speeding up the traditionally compute-intensive workloads. For example, Google illustrated quantum supremacy by completing a sampling calculation task in 200 seconds, which is otherwise impracticable on the world’s largest supercomputers. To this end, quantum-based learning has become an area of interest, with the potential of a quantum speedup. In this paper, we propose GenQu, a hybrid and general-purpose quantum framework for learning classical data through quantum states. We evaluate GenQu with real datasets and conduct experiments on both simulations and real quantum computer IBM-Q. Our evaluation demonstrates that, compared with classical solutions, the proposed models running on GenQu framework achieve similar accuracy with a much smaller number of qubits, while significantly reducing the parameter size by up to 95.86% and converging speedup by 33.33% faster.