In the spotlight: ‘An operating system for executing applications on quantum network nodes’

The goal of future quan­tum net­works is to enable new inter­net appli­ca­tions that are impos­si­ble to achieve using only clas­si­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion^1,2,3. Up to now, demon­stra­tions of quan­tum net­work appli­ca­tions^4,5,6 and func­tion­al­i­ties^{7,8,9,10,11,12} on quan­tum proces­sors have been per­formed in ad hoc soft­ware that was spe­cif­ic to the exper­i­men­tal set­up, pro­grammed to per­form one sin­gle task (the appli­ca­tion exper­i­ment) direct­ly into low-lev­el con­trol devices using exper­tise in exper­i­men­tal physics. Here we report on the design and imple­men­ta­tion of an archi­tec­ture capa­ble of exe­cut­ing quan­tum net­work appli­ca­tions on quan­tum proces­sors in plat­form-inde­pen­dent high-lev­el soft­ware. We demon­strate the capa­bil­i­ty of the archi­tec­ture to exe­cute appli­ca­tions in high-lev­el soft­ware by imple­ment­ing it as a quan­tum net­work oper­at­ing system—QNodeOS—and exe­cut­ing test pro­grams, includ­ing a del­e­gat­ed com­pu­ta­tion from a client to a serv­er¹³ on two quan­tum net­work nodes based on nitro­gen-vacan­cy (NV) cen­tres in dia­mond^14,15. We show how our archi­tec­ture allows us to max­i­mize the use of quan­tum net­work hard­ware by mul­ti­task­ing dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions. Our archi­tec­ture can be used to exe­cute pro­grams on any quan­tum proces­sor plat­form cor­re­spond­ing to our sys­tem mod­el, which we illus­trate by demon­strat­ing an extra dri­ver for QNodeOS for a trapped-ion quan­tum net­work node based on a sin­gle ⁴⁰Ca⁺ atom¹⁶. Our archi­tec­ture lays the ground­work for com­put­er sci­ence research in quan­tum net­work pro­gram­ming and paves the way for the devel­op­ment of soft­ware that can bring quan­tum net­work tech­nol­o­gy to soci­ety.

Arti­cle pub­li­ca­tion is found here.

Dataset pub­li­ca­tion is found here.