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.

As quantum computing hardware systems continue to advance, the research and development of performant, scalable, and extensible software architectures, languages, models, and compilers is equally as important to bring this novel coprocessing capability to a diverse group of domain computational scientists. For the field of quantum chemistry, applications and frameworks exist for modeling and simulation tasks that scale on heterogeneous classical architectures, and we envision the need for similar frameworks on heterogeneous quantum-classical platforms. Here, we present the XACC system-level quantum computing framework as a platform for prototyping, developing, and deploying quantum-classical software that specifically targets chemistry applications. We review the fundamental design features in XACC, with special attention to its extensibility and modularity for key quantum programming workflow interfaces and provide an overview of the interfaces most relevant to simulations of chemistry. A series of examples demonstrating some of the state-of-the-art chemistry algorithms currently implemented in XACC are presented, while also illustrating the various APIs that would enable the community to extend, modify, and devise new algorithms and applications in the realm of chemistry.

We present qcor—a language extension to C++ and compiler implementation that enables heterogeneous quantum-classical programming, compilation, and execution in a single-source context. Our work provides a first-of-its-kind C++ compiler enabling high-level quantum kernel (function) expression in a quantum-language agnostic manner, as well as a hardware-agnostic, retargetable compiler workflow targeting a number of physical and virtual quantum computing backends. qcor leverages novel Clang plugin interfaces and builds upon the XACC system-level quantum programming framework to provide a state-of-the-art integration mechanism for quantum-classical compilation that leverages the best from the community at-large. qcor translates quantum kernels ultimately to the XACC intermediate representation, and provides user-extensible hooks for quantum compilation routines like circuit optimization, analysis, and placement. This work details the overall architecture and compiler workflow for qcor, and provides a number of illuminating programming examples demonstrating its utility for near-term variational tasks, quantum algorithm expression, and feed-forward error correction schemes.