NISQ devices have several physical limitations and unavoidable noisy quantum operations, and only small circuits can be executed on a quantum machine to get reliable results. This leads to the quantum hardware under-utilization issue. Here, we address this problem and improve the quantum hardware throughput by proposing a Quantum Multi-programming Compiler (QuMC) to execute multiple quantum circuits on quantum hardware simultaneously. This approach can also reduce the total runtime of circuits. We first introduce a parallelism manager to select an appropriate number of circuits to be executed at the same time. Second, we present two different qubit partitioning algorithms to allocate reliable partitions to multiple circuits - a greedy and a heuristic. Third, we use the Simultaneous Randomized Benchmarking protocol to characterize the crosstalk properties and consider them in the qubit partition process to avoid the crosstalk effect during simultaneous executions. Finally, we enhance the mapping transition algorithm to make circuits executable on hardware using a decreased number of inserted gates. We demonstrate the performance of our QuMC approach by executing circuits of different sizes on IBM quantum hardware simultaneously. We also investigate this method on VQE algorithm to reduce its overhead.

翻译：NISQ设备存在多项物理限制及不可避免的噪声量子操作，仅在量子计算机上执行小型电路方能获得可靠结果，这导致量子硬件利用率不足的问题。本文通过提出量子多程序编译器（Quantum Multi-programming Compiler, QuMC），实现多个量子电路在量子硬件上的并行执行，从而解决上述问题并提升量子硬件吞吐量。该方法还能有效降低电路总运行时长。我们首先引入并行度管理器，用于选择同时执行的合理电路数量；其次，提出两种量子比特划分算法（贪心算法与启发式算法），为多个电路分配可靠分区；第三，采用同步随机基准测试协议表征串扰特性，并在量子比特分区过程中考虑这些特性，以避免并行执行阶段的串扰效应；最后，通过优化映射转换算法，在减少插入门数量的前提下确保电路在硬件上的可执行性。通过在IBM量子硬件上同步执行不同规模的电路，验证了QuMC方法的性能。我们还基于VQE算法对该方法进行测试，以降低其开销。