A pragma based C++ framework for hybrid quantum/classical computation

Quantum computers promise exponential speed ups over classical computers for various tasks. This emerging technology is expected to have its first huge impact in High Performance Computing (HPC), as it can solve problems beyond the reach of HPC. To that end, HPC will require quantum accelerators, which will enable applications to run on both classical and quantum devices, via hybrid quantum-classical nodes. Hybrid quantum-HPC applications should be scalable, executable on Quantum Error Corrected (QEC) devices, and could use quantum-classical primitives. However, the lack of scalability, poor performances, and inability to insert classical schemes within quantum applications has prevented current quantum frameworks from being adopted by the HPC community.

This paper specifies the requirements of a hybrid quantum-classical framework compatible with HPC environments, and introduces a novel hardware-agnostic framework called Q-Pragma. This framework extends the classical programming language C++ heavily used in HPC via the addition of pragma directives to manage quantum computations.