ESEC/FSE 2020 Workshops
28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2020)
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1st ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Architectures and Paradigms for Engineering Quantum Software (APEQS 2020), November 13, 2020, Virtual, USA

APEQS 2020 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors
Twitter: https://twitter.com/esecfse

1st ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Architectures and Paradigms for Engineering Quantum Software (APEQS 2020)

Frontmatter

Title Page


Message from the Chairs
Welcome to the 1st International Workshop on Architectures and Paradigms for Engineering Quantum Software (APEQS). This satellite workshop of the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) took place on Monday, November 9, 2020, as a virtual event.
The workshop intends to bridge gaps between disciplines, and bring researchers working on traditional software engineering in contact with persons from non-software centric fields: We believe that many unsolved and interesting issues can be found at boundaries and intersections between fields, and that there are insufficient venues to publish such cross-disciplinary results. We also believe that a big aspect of future quantum computing will concern software, and software engineering should consequently act as a platform to connect. Many important questions regarding quantum software concern fundamental scientific issues, but must at the same time show their merits on real machines.

Keynote

Designing and Benchmarking Full-Stack Quantum Systems (Keynote)
Carmen G. Almudever
(Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
Quantum computing is now in the so-called NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era, in which quantum processors with a limited number of qubits and imperfect behaviour are capable to execute relatively small quantum algorithms. In order to leverage the computational power of such error-prone devices, not only efficient compilation techniques are required but also optimized full-stacks need to be developed. In this talk, I will provide an overview on the compilation of quantum algorithms on NISQ devices. I will also discuss how the use of structured design space exploration methodologies could help towards the development of a cross-layer co-design framework for full-stack quantum systems that will allow for a top-bottom, bottom-up optimizations across layers and the benchmarking of quantum computers.

Publisher's Version

Papers

The Quantum Software Lifecycle
Benjamin Weder, Johanna Barzen, Frank Leymann, Marie Salm, and Daniel Vietz
(University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Quantum computing is an emerging paradigm that enables to solve a variety of problems more efficiently than it is possible on classical computers. As the first quantum computers are available, quantum algorithms can be implemented and executed on real quantum hardware. However, the capabilities of today’s quantum computers are very limited and quantum computations are always disturbed by some error. Thus, further research is needed to develop or improve quantum algorithms, quantum computers, or required software tooling support. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of quantum computing, a common understanding of how to develop and execute a quantum software application is needed. However, there is currently no methodology or lifecycle comprising all relevant phases that can occur during the development and execution process. Hence, in this paper, we introduce the quantum software lifecycle consisting of ten phases a gate-based quantum software application should go through. We analyze the purpose of each phase, the available methods and tools that can be applied, and the open problems or research questions. Therefore, the lifecycle can be used as a baseline for discussions and future research.

Publisher's Version
About a Criterion of Successfully Executing a Circuit in the NISQ Era: What wd ≪ 1/𝜖 eff Really Means
Marie Salm, Johanna Barzen, Frank Leymann, and Benjamin Weder
(University of Stuttgart, Germany)
To evaluate classical software, a huge variety of software metrics exists. Similar metrics of quantum algorithms especially in context of near-term quantum computers are only rudimentary investigated. Hereby, metrics are particularly important to be able to estimate what is already possible with current quantum computers. Thus, in this paper, we discuss existing quantum performance metrics and focus on a metric that determines whether a quantum circuit is successfully executable on a given gate-based quantum computer. Thereby, we give an overview of various factors that can affect an execution and present our plan to concretize and apply the metric.

Publisher's Version
Modeling Quantum Programs: Challenges, Initial Results, and Research Directions
Shaukat Ali and Tao Yue
(Simula Research Laboratory, Norway; Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China)
Quantum programming languages provide necessary constructs to program quantum computers. To write such programs, one needs to understand the characteristics of quantum computers such as superposition and entanglement, which are novel as compared to programming with classical computers. Understanding these characteristics requires an understanding of quantum physics. Thus, there is a need to build high-level modeling abstractions of quantum programs for software engineers who are used to program on classical computers to understand and model quantum programs at a high-level of abstraction and independent of quantum platforms. To this end, we present some ideas for developing such quantum software modeling languages, by presenting a conceptual model of quantum programs and an example of modeling the state-based behavior of quantum entanglement program. Moreover, we present some open issues in the area of modeling quantum programs.

Publisher's Version
Quantum Shuttle: Traffic Navigation with Quantum Computing
Sheir Yarkoni, Florian Neukart, Eliane Moreno Gomez Tagle, Nicole Magiera, Bharat Mehta, Kunal Hire, Swapnil Narkhede, and Martin Hofmann
(Volkswagen, Germany; Volkswagen Advanced Technologies, USA; Hexad, Germany)
The Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, is one of the biggest technology conferences in Europe, attended by tens of thousands of people every year. The high influx of people into Lisbon causes significant stress on the city's transit services for the duration of the conference. For the Web Summit 2019, Volkswagen AG partnered with the city of Lisbon for a pilot project to provide quantum computing-based traffic optimization. A two-phase solution was implemented: the first phase used data science techniques to analyze the movement of people from previous conferences to build temporary new bus routes throughout the city. The second phase used a custom Android navigation app installed in the buses operated by Carris, powered by a quantum optimization service provided by Volkswagen that connected to live traffic data and a D-Wave quantum processing unit to optimize the buses' routes in real-time. To our knowledge, this is the first commercial application that depends on a quantum processor to perform a critical live task.

Publisher's Version

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