Utilizing Resource Estimation for the Development of Quantum Computing Applications

Quantum computing has made considerable progress in recent years in both software and hardware. But to unlock the power of quantum computers in solving problems that cannot be efficiently solved classically, quantum computing at scale is necessary. Unfortunately, quantum simulators suffer from their exponential complexity and, at the same time, the currently available quantum computing hardware is still rather limited (even if roadmaps make intriguing promises). Hence, in order to evaluate quantum computing applications, end-users are still frequently restricted to toy-size problem instances (which additionally often do not take error correction into account). This substantially hinders the development and assessment of real-world quantum computing applications. In this work, we demonstrate how to utilize Resource Estimation to improve this situation. We show how the current workflow (relying on simulation and/or execution) can be complemented with an estimation step, allowing that end-users (1) actually can consider real-world problem instances already today (also considering error correction schemes and correspondingly required hardware resources), (2) can start exploring possible optimizations of those instances across the entire design space, and (3) can incorporate hypotheses of hardware development trends to derive more informed and, thus, better design space parameters. Overall, this enables end-users already today to check out the promises of possible future quantum computing applications, even if the corresponding hardware to execute them is not available yet.