Three Birds with One Stone: Improving Performance, Convergence, and System Throughput with NEST

Abstract

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have the potential to demonstrate quantum utility on near-term quantum computers. However, these algorithms often get executed on the highest-fidelity qubits and computers to achieve the best performance, causing low system throughput. Recent efforts have shown that VQAs can be run on low-fidelity qubits initially and high-fidelity qubits later on to still achieve good performance. We take this effort forward and show that carefully varying the qubit fidelity map of the VQA over its execution using our technique, Nest, does not just (1) improve performance (i.e., help achieve close to optimal results), but also (2) lead to faster convergence. We also use Nest to co-locate multiple VQAs concurrently on the same computer, thus (3) increasing the system throughput, and therefore, balancing and optimizing three conflicting metrics simultaneously.