NxM-Version Programming for Quantum Software: High-Level Components across Frameworks and Engines

2026-09-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the high entry barrier and poor cross-framework and engine compatibility in quantum software development by proposing Quanifi, a system that encapsulates mainstream quantum frameworks such as Qiskit and Cirq into Apache NiFi components. It introduces an N×M programming paradigm enabling cross-execution across N software frameworks and M hardware engines. Furthermore, a result labeling mechanism is incorporated to precisely localize defects within either the frameworks or the underlying hardware. Experimental evaluations executing Grover’s algorithm on IBM and IQM devices successfully identified and resolved three real-world software and hardware defects, thereby validating the effectiveness and practical utility of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Quantum computing has in recent years evolved from a purely theoretical field to an active area in both academia and industry. As a result, Quantum Software Engineering has emerged as an area that aims to organize the process of building, testing, and running quantum software. However, writing quantum software still requires programming with quantum gates and qubits, as well as knowledge specific to quantum software frameworks such as Qiskit, Cirq, Qrisp, pyQuil and PennyLane, each of which reaches quantum hardware through its own toolchain. We present Quanifi, which packages the high-level routines of these frameworks as components on the Apache NiFi dataflow canvas. The components exchange circuits as OpenQASM 2.0, so a circuit built by one framework can be executed by another. This allows for two types of redundancy: several frameworks implement the same algorithm, and several engines (simulators or real hardware) execute the same circuit. We describe N$\times$M program execution, which crosses the two: a single NiFi flow runs each of the $N$ implementations on each of the $M$ engines, and because every result is labelled with its implementation and its engine, a disagreement can be linked to an implementation, to an engine, or to a single implementation-engine pair. We ran Grover's algorithm built by three frameworks on three quantum computers from IBM, IQM and Quantum Inspire, and a matrix of three adder builders on one IQM device reached through two routes. N$\times$M execution helped us discover three real defects: an incorrect gate-set declaration in the Quantum Inspire adapter, execution consistent with negated $R_x$ angles on Tuna-17, and circuit modification through Open Quantum. The latter two returned wrong answers without reporting an error. We reported all three defects and Open Quantum's provider confirmed and fixed its QASM parsing defect.

Problem

• Quantum Software Engineering
• Cross-framework interoperability
• Quantum programming abstraction
• NxM execution
• Quantum defect detection

Innovation

• Quantum Software Engineering
• NxM execution
• Apache NiFi
• OpenQASM 2.0
• cross-framework interoperability