SlackQ : Approaching the Qubit Mapping Problem with A Slack-aware Swap Insertion Scheme

Abstract: The rapid progress of physical implementation of quantum computers paved the way for the design of tools to help users write quantum programs for any given quantum device. The physical constraints inherent in current NISQ architectures prevent most quantum algorithms from being directly executed on quantum devices. To enable two-qubit gates in the algorithm, existing works focus on inserting SWAP gates to dynamically remap logical qubits to physical qubits. However, their schemes lack consideration of the execution time of generated quantum circuits. In this work, we propose a slack-aware SWAP insertion scheme for the qubit mapping problem in the NISQ era. Our experiments show performance improvement by up to 2.36X at maximum, by 1.62X on average, over 106 representative benchmarks from RevLib, IBM Qiskit , and ScaffCC.