Enabling multi-programming mechanism for quantum computing in the NISQ era

As NISQ devices have several physical limitations and unavoidable noisy quantum operations, only small circuits can be executed on a quantum machine to get reliable results. This leads to the quantum hardware under-utilization issue. Here, we address this problem and improve the quantum hardware throughput by proposing a multiprogramming approach to execute multiple quantum circuits on quantum hardware simultaneously. We first introduce a parallelism manager to select an appropriate number of circuits to be executed at the same time. Second, we present two different qubit partitioning algorithms to allocate reliable partitions to multiple circuits-a greedy and a heuristic. Third, we use the Simultaneous Randomized Benchmarking protocol to characterize the crosstalk properties and consider them in the qubit partition process to avoid crosstalk effect during simultaneous executions. Finally, we enhance the mapping transition algorithm to make circuits executable on hardware using decreased number of inserted gates. We demonstrate the performance of our multi-programming approach by executing circuits of different size on IBM quantum hardware simultaneously. We also investigate this method on VQE algorithm to reduce its overhead.