Quantum computers promise to speedup many important applications, some of which are almost impossible to solve even on the world’s most powerful supercomputers in a reasonable amount of time. Today, quantum computers with a few hundred qubits are already available, and qubit counts are expected to surpass a few thousands in coming years. Quantum computing is an interdisciplinary field with topics ranging from applications and algorithms to programming, compilers, systems, architecture, and physical devices. This course will focus on the architecture and software stack that translates the mathematical properties of quantum states that algorithms rely on into state changes on the physical qubits, much like how general-purpose computers require compilers, micro-architecture, and system-level solutions for functionality and high performance.
Course Objectives: Provide a basic understanding of quantum computing from a software and systems perspective so that students can potentially pursue advanced research in related areas.
Course Topics:
- Basics of quantum computing (superposition, entanglement) and fundamental quantum algorithms (Bernstein Vazirani)
- Quantum hardware limitations (noisy qubit devices and imperfect quantum operations)
- Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum computing and software for error mitigation
- Fault tolerant quantum computing and architectures for quantum error correction