“Programming, Compilation, and Architecture for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing”

Quantum computers hold great promise but are extremely fragile—tiny errors accumulate quickly and threaten to overwhelm computations. Quantum error correction (QEC) and fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) provide the theoretical foundation for overcoming this challenge, but putting these ideas into practice is a daunting task. In this talk, I will give a tutorial introduction to QEC and FTQC, explaining the key concepts and why they are central to scalable quantum computing. I will then describe how computer science methods—particularly compiler and computer-aided design techniques—can help us manage the complexity of implementing QEC in practice. To illustrate this direction, I will briefly present some of our recent work on optimizing QEC execution and verifying its correctness.

Gushu Li is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania. His research interest lies in the emerging quantum computer system and spans the quantum programming language, quantum compiler, and quantum computer architecture. He received the NSF CAREER Award and the Intel Rising Star Faculty Award, the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA 2020, and an NSF Quantum Information Science and Engineering Network Fellow Grant Award. His research outputs have been adopted by many industry/academia quantum software frameworks, including IBM’s Qiskit, Quantinuum’s TKET, Oak Ridge National Lab’s qcor, etc.