CST Seminar: Hardware Description Languages for Integrated Quantum-Classical Computations

Background

Gilbert Netzer is a doctoral student at PDC who is supervised by Stefano Markidis. Gilbert will present his PhD work in this seminar, which will mark the 30% progression step in his doctoral studies. Stefano, as Gilbert’s main supervisor, will chair the session.

Abstract

Quantum computing – an alternative approach for constructing computational machines using the principles of quantum mechanics – promises to solve some classically hard computational problems with polynomial complexity, a feature that is exciting interest in both academic research domains and industry. One of the major challenges in making use of the current generation of noisy intermediate scale quantum computers is the short time available to do quantum computations which is a limitation arising from the hardware.

In this seminar, Gilbert will present the initial progress of his work in trying to closely couple both quantum and classical computations in order to unlock novel applications for quantum computing that are hard to to implement in today's mainstream “single-shot” programming approaches. The proof-of-concept implementation that he will present attempted to use concepts from hardware description languages to define a novel programming environment called QHDL and demonstrate quantum/classical co-simulation for a simple quantum circuit demonstrating maximally entangled qubits called Bell pairs.

Gilbert will also outline future research planned for the remainder of his PhD studies in this area.