The 15th Software Engineering Conference Russia 2019 (SECR 2019), a key annual event in this field in Eastern Europe, took place on November 14-15 in St. Petersburg; more than 500 participants from the industry take part in it. Traditionally, the winners of the Bertrand Meyer Award were announced at the closing of the conference. Bertrand Meyer is a professor at Politecnico di Milano and Innopolis University and initial designer of the Eiffel method and language. The prize is awarded annually for the best paper presented in the SECR program.
This year, the award was shared between two works by the decision of the program committee. One of them is “Automated Generation of Quantum Circuit Specifications Based on Reed-Muller Expressions” by Vitaly Kalmychkov and Irina Matveeva, associate professors of the Department of Computer Aided Design of ETU “LETI.”
Vitaly Kalmychkov presented the paper at the conference. The presentation was devoted to current trends in quantum computing and a promising area for the creation and programming of quantum computers. Vitaly Kalmychkov spoke about the experience of developing a modular system for the automatic generation of quantum circuit specifications, used as the basis for the logical representation of a quantum computing process. He also proposed methods for automatic minimization of quantum circuits based on scalable templates, their evaluation, and automatic verification. Today, quantum technologies are already used in telecommunications (security, cryptography), fast computing (artificial intelligence and processing of large amounts of data), modeling of complex systems (physical, chemical) and materials in medicine.
“In our study, we offer automation of the design process of quantum circuit specifications, based on a combination of classical mathematical foundations with a common approach to the development of quantum algorithms based on a set of CkNOT converters with multiple control taking into account the nearest neighbor architecture. Our toolkit provides an automatic compilation of all possible variants of quantum circuits using Reed-Muller expressions, including automatic modes for switching to the linearly nearest neighbor while minimizing the number of SWAP converters based on the scalable patterns that we have implemented, automatic statistics collection, visualization, lexical verification of equivalency of quantum chains compilation results. In general, this allows us to choose from all automatically generated specifications variants of quantum circuits under various criteria.”
Today, the development of ETU “LETI” researchers is extremely relevant. Quantum computers are shifting from the field of scientific interest and research laboratories to the mass user. On October 23, 2019, one of Google’s divisions announced achieving the quantum supremacy. The company introduced a quantum algorithm that solves the problem of generating a random sequence on a quantum processor. IBM provides a cloud service for those wishing to implement quantum algorithms on an existing quantum computer. Rosatom announced a large-scale project to create a Russian quantum computer.
Also at the conference, Vladimir Litoshenko, a graduate of the Faculty of Computer Science and Technology of ETU “LETI” in 2006, Deputy General Director of First Line Software, presented the practical results of using the IBM Q cloud quantum platform for quantum computing.
“There was a friendly, creative atmosphere at the conference, which was made possible by the organizing committee with the involvement of volunteers, among whom were ETU “LETI” students,” Vitaly Kalmychkov, Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Aided Design of ETU “LETI,” says.
In total, researchers submitted more than 150 applications to the conference. After a careful selection, organizers accepted 99 papers on topics of programming tools, cloud services, the Internet of Things, development team management and others.