Module-conditioned distribution of quantum circuits

Abstract: As quantum computers require highly specialized and stable environments to operate, expanding their capabilities within a single system presents significant technical challenges. By interconnecting multiple quantum processors, distributed quantum computing can facilitate the execution of more complex and larger-scale quantum algorithms. End-to-end heuristics for the distribution of quantum circuits have been developed so far. In this work, we derive an exact integer programming approach for the Distributed Quantum Circuit (DQC) problem, assuming fixed module allocations. Since every DQC algorithm necessarily yields a module allocation function, our formulation can be integrated with it as a post-processing step. This improves on the hypergraph partitioning formulation, which finds a module allocation function and an efficient distribution at once. We also show that a suboptimal heuristic to find good allocations can outperform previous methods. In particular, for quantum Fourier transform circuits, we conjecture from experiments that the optimal module allocation is the trivial one found by this method.