Circuit Partitioning for the Quantum Internet

In a quantum internet, quantum processing units (QPUs) with varying architectures and capabilities may be connected through quantum communication channels, enabling new applications such as distributed quantum computing (DQC), a paradigm in which multiple QPUs execute a single circuit. However, remote operations between QPUs are expensive as they require the creation and distribution of entanglement throughout the network. It is therefore crucial to assign qubits to QPUs and partition circuits in such a way that the overall communication between QPUs is minimized. In this paper, we apply and evaluate simulated annealing and an evolutionary algorithm for this problem. We consider quantum networks with 25 nodes arranged in different topologies and QPUs with varying qubit capacities. The circuits evaluated contain 50 and 100 qubits. We show that the different metaheuristics all significantly outperform the baselines by drastically reducing the communication cost by over 40%.