P12: Compilation and Benchmarking Environment for Trapped-Ion Quantum Computing (ComfortQC)

Members: Prof. Dr. Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler (JGUM), Prof. Dr. Robert Wille (TUM), David Braune (JGUM), Jurek Eisinger (JGUM), Dr. Janine Hilder (JGUM), Dr. Ulrich Poschinger (JGUM), Ludwig Schmid (TUM), Daniel Schönberger (TUM), Linus Schulte (TUM), Janis Wagner (JGUM)

Trapped-ion quantum computers represent a promising platform for achieving quantum computational advantage – demonstrating exceptional performance in qubit entanglement, gate fidelities, coherence times, and versatile qubit register reconfiguration operations. Despite their promising capabilities, the lack of corresponding hardware-adaptive software prevents existing hardware platforms from unleashing their full computational potential. The development of such hardware-tailored software requires close interdisciplinary collaboration between experimental and theoretical physics as well as computer science to fully leverage the unique hardware characteristics of trapped-ion systems. This interdisciplinary research project between the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) aims to provide the basis for a comprehensive software ecosystem specifically tailored to state-of-the-art trapped-ion quantum computing hardware. 

The proposed research addresses the challenges through four integrated steps: (1) Identification and characterization of elementary hardware operations, including ion shuttling. (2) Determination of the full set of computational capabilities and constraints of trapped-ion systems and deriving abstract hardware models allowing extensible and reusable software interfaces. (3) Developing optimal and efficient compilation methodologies and providing the results as high-quality open-source software to the community. (4) Using application-driven automated benchmarking procedures to assess and co-design the underlying hard- and software components and tracking improvements of the computational performance throughout the project.

This initiative seeks to provide fundamental building blocks and to lay the groundwork for future community-driven software development, eventually leading to the development of a complete and fully functional software stack. Therefore, we will provide results open-source. The collaborative approach bridges experimental and theoretical physics as well as computer science and combines knowledge resources from both fields to contribute significant theoretical and practical insights as well as tools to the trapped-ion quantum computing community.