Quantum programming techniques and software have advanced significantly over the past five years, with a majority focusing on high-level language frameworks targeting remote REST library APIs. As quantum computing architectures advance and become more widely available, lower-level, system software infrastructures will be needed to enable tighter, co-processor programming and access models. Here we present XACC, a system-level software infrastructure for quantum-classical computing that promotes a service-oriented architecture to expose interfaces for core quantum programming, compilation, and execution tasks. We detail XACC's interfaces, their interactions, and its implementation as a hardware-agnostic framework for both near-term and future quantum-classical architectures. We provide concrete examples demonstrating the utility of this framework with paradigmatic tasks. Our approach lays the foundation for the development of compilers, associated runtimes, and low-level system tools tightly integrating quantum and classical workflows.
@article{arxiv.1911.02452,
title = {XACC: A System-Level Software Infrastructure for Heterogeneous Quantum-Classical Computing},
author = {Alexander J. McCaskey and Dmitry I. Lyakh and Eugene F. Dumitrescu and Sarah S. Powers and Travis S. Humble},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.02452},
year = {2019}
}