The near-term intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers available today have few qubits and are noisy. There are also various different architectures for implementing qubits, and different architectures often have different operations that can be run on them. It is advantageous if a quantum algorithm developer can run the developed algorithms on various different quantum computers without the need to write different software for different architectures, while also not compromising on performance. To enable this, in the NISQ.OS project NPL is working with Riverlane and various quantum computing hardware companies in the UK (ARM, Duality Quantum Photonics, Hitachi, Oxford Ionics, Oxford Quantum Circuits, Seeqc, and Universal Quantum) to develop a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that enables quantum algorithms to be written in a way that can be run on different qubit architectures. The draft specification for the HAL document is available at qhal.npl.co.uk.
This is an InnovateUK project.