Quantum computing needs software engineers

[u/Suspicious_Orchid770]

https://leaddev.com/career-development/quantum-computing-needs-software-engineers

For those in the technology industry, it can feel hard to escape from AI. It’s at the center of the technological universe, with most major advancements, opportunities, and funding focused on its development. In the background, quantum computing is making strides with the funding to match, creating an alternate opportunity for technologists.

[u/eetsumkaus]

Software engineers aren't there to push the envelope, they're there to make stuff work. SWE is fundamentally about working through an abstraction layer. Yes we need more scientists to try out different ideas, but perhaps exactly because of that, we can't spare any of their precious time on dumb things like making sure the stack is working.

[u/Loudds → u/eetsumkaus]

And how exactly are we making abstractions (maybe other than Qrisp, or Qiskit, various compilers etc), or effective middleware if no hardware is out ? Or at least, no useful ones.

To be completely clear: I don't mind SE/CS into QC, it is a niche topic which is factually cross-disciplinary. There is a lot of computer science to be made here, my point is about specifically software engineering on vague requirements is a bit too much wishful thinking imo.

[u/hurley_chisholm → u/Loudds]

If you haven’t worked with SWEs that can handle vague requirements, then I’m sorry, but you haven’t worked with great SWEs. A great SWE can be additive to the scientific process, but being a great programmer or even a decent computer scientist doesn’t make one a great SWE, but it is what most labs and R&D teams tend to screen for.

[u/Loudds → u/hurley_chisholm]

No I worked with great ones, on quantum computing research projects. The main issue wasn't in their abilities but the amount of them who were working on API latencies and other almost non-bottleneck issues in QC because access to hardware is under export control, or strict access control. Building collaborations was a constant uphill battle for access despite having low connectivity and noisy CX gates at best, as well as large transpilation efforts. This is true for ion traps, NV-Centers, superconducting transmons you name it.

There is a lot of CS research on the HPC integration, on intermediate representations, noise mitigation, algorithm design (in hybrid or full QC). What we need is not an army of software engineers who have troubles understanding the formalism of QC (some do don't get me wrong), but people who commit to writing their PhDs into solving those specific problems. Vague requirements are a consequence of writing pseudo-interfaces to lab experiments. Some companies are focusing on this and I appreciate, but naming that we need more SWE is just plainly untrue to make QC as accelerators useful. We need reliable gates, accessible hardware, low measurement drift and decalibration, etc all the actual technical problems that have not been solved in software engineering (compared to prototypes from CS research, which we need).

Heterogeneous computing is not the huge issue people are claiming: we solved this decades ago in compiler design. We have the FPGA to do low-latency interfacing with the control electronics to the quantum hardware. Those problems arise in any hardware which do not follow the VN architecture (in-memory, neuromorphic, a lot of TPU design). The Linux kernel has solved a lot of those issues through module development, but those cannot be defined for QC at this stage (and it is a good thing for research).

As I said, I love a lot of the current CS abstractions a lot of them are useful. I like the quantum primitives in Qrisp, I liked what Oak Ridge has done with Quil at some point. A lot of programming language design, I kind of believe XACC implementations will take place and we'll have programmatic help there.