Due to little consideration in the hardware constraints, e.g., limited connections between physical qubits to enable two-qubit gates, most quantum algorithms cannot be directly executed on the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Dynamically remapping logical qubits to physical qubits in the compiler is needed to enable the two-qubit gates in the algorithm, which introduces additional operations and inevitably reduces the fidelity of the algorithm. Previous solutions in finding such remapping suffer from high complexity, poor initial mapping quality, and limited flexibility and controllability. To address these drawbacks mentioned above, this paper proposes a SWAP-based BidiREctional heuristic search algorithm SABRE, which is applicable to NISQ devices with arbitrary connections between qubits. By optimizing every search attempt,globally optimizing the initial mapping using a novel reverse traversal technique, introducing the decay effect to enable the trade-off between the depth and the number of gates of the entire algorithm, SABRE outperforms the best known algorithm with exponential speedup and comparable or better results on various benchmarks.
Zulehner tried to use A* search plus heuristic cost function @cite_53 (BKA in this paper). They divided the two-qubit gates into independent layers similar to IBM's solution. Then they searched all possible combination of SWAP gates to minimize the sum of distance between the coupled qubits in the layer and reduce the depth of the final output circuit at the same time. Although their method is much faster and better than IBM's approach and only requires up to several minutes on 16-qubit circuits, searching all possible combinations of concurrent SWAP gates still requires exponential time. Their initial mapping was determined by only those two-qubit gates at the beginning of the circuit without global consideration.
@cite_53
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In March 2017, IBM launched the project IBM Q with the goal to provide access to quantum computers for a broad audience. This allowed users to conduct quantum experiments on a 5-qubit and, since June 2017, also on a 16-qubit quantum computer (called IBM QX2 and IBM QX3, respectively). In order to use these, the desired quantum functionality (e.g. provided in terms of a quantum circuit) has to properly be mapped so that the underlying physical constraints are satisfied - a complex task. This demands for solutions to automatically and efficiently conduct this mapping process. In this paper, we propose such an approach which satisfies all constraints given by the architecture and, at the same time, aims to keep the overhead in terms of additionally required quantum gates minimal. The proposed approach is generic and can easily be configured for future architectures. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach clearly outperforms IBM's own mapping solution. In fact, for many quantum circuits, the proposed approach determines a mapping to the IBM architecture within less than five minutes (and within a fraction of a second in most cases), while IBM's solution suffers from long runtimes and runs into a timeout of 1 hour in several cases. As an additional benefit, the proposed approach yields mapped circuits with smaller costs (i.e. fewer additional gates are required).