A survey of programming tools for D-wave quantum-annealing processors

Abstract

The rapid growth in the realized performance of D-Wave Systems’ annealing-based quantum processing units (QPUs) has sparked a surge in tools development to deliver the anticipated performance to application developers. In this survey we describe the tools that are available, their goals (e.g., performance or ease of use), the programming abstractions they expose, and their use for application development. The existing tools confirm the need for interfaces at a variety of points on the continuum between complexity and simplicity in using the QPU. Most of the current tools abstract the hardware’s native topology but generally not using existing interfaces that are familiar to typical programmers. To date, only a small number of applications have been implemented for QPUs. Our survey finds that tools provide potentially great leverage to enable more applications as long as the tools expose the appropriate abstractions and deliver the anticipated performance.