Characterizing the Inter-Core Qubit Traffic in Large-Scale Quantum Modular Architectures

Modular quantum processor architectures are envisioned as a promising solution for the scalability of quantum computing systems beyond the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. Based upon interconnecting tens to hundreds of quantum processors (i.e cores) via quantum coherent and classical links, this approach unravels the pressing limitations of densely qubit-packed monolithic processors, mainly by mitigating the requirements of qubit control and enhancing qubit isolation. Therefore, this new architectural design enables executing large-scale algorithms in a distributed manner. In order to assess the performance and optimize such architectures, it is crucial to analyze the quantum state transfers occurring via inter-core communication networks, referred to as inter-core qubit traffic. This would provide insights to improve the software and hardware stack for multi-core quantum computers. To this aim, we present a characterization of the spatio-temporal inter-core qubit traffic for different large-scale quantum algorithms. The programs are compiled on an all-to-all connected multi-core architecture that supports up to around 1000 qubits. We characterize the qubit traffic based on multiple performance metrics to assess the computational process and the communication overhead. Based on the showcased results, we conclude on the parallelization and scalability of presented algorithms, qualitatively evaluate the resource requirements as we scale circuit sizes, and lay the foundations of application-oriented benchmarking of large-scale multi-core architectures.