StreamingQEC: Streaming Quantum Error Correction in Tightly Integrated Quantum-Classical Systems via Certified Recurrence

2026-07-14

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of system-level modeling of resource contention and scheduling in existing quantum error correction (QEC) simulators, which hinders the design of hybrid pipelined architectures for fault-tolerant quantum computing. The authors propose a system-level simulation framework that maps logical workloads onto resource-constrained streaming QEC pipelines by integrating discrete-event simulation with a staged fluid approximation model, enabling efficient design space exploration. A novel certified recurrence mechanism is introduced to compress redundant state transitions while preserving scheduling consistency, substantially accelerating simulation. Experiments demonstrate a 24.0× speedup on a 16-task benchmark while retaining nearly 60 million decoding events; the recurrence-based simulation scales beyond 1.2 billion events, and the fluid-mode approximation incurs only a 2.60% average makespan error, effectively revealing critical pipeline behaviors such as communication bottlenecks and decoder-induced stalls.

Abstract

Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires a continuous hybrid quantum error correction (QEC) pipeline comprising measurement readout, syndrome transport, decoding, feedback, and control. Existing QEC simulators primarily evaluate circuits, noise models, decoders, and protocol-level outcomes. System architects, however, must also understand how these workloads contend for and queue across controller, compute, accelerator, and communication resources during protected logical execution. We introduce StreamingQEC, a system-level simulator that translates fault-tolerant logical workloads into resource-constrained streaming-QEC pipelines. An explicit discrete-event simulation provides the reference execution semantics. An automatic staged-fluid mode enables faster approximate design-space exploration, while a certified recurrence mechanism compresses repeated transitions only when their scheduling state and metric contributions match those of the explicit execution trace. We assemble a decoder-runtime dataset containing 9,998 measurements, of which 8,174 are used to fit performance profiles. Recurrence reproduces the reported explicit-simulation metrics across 35 calibrated-profile configurations, as well as additional workload and cadence validation cases. For a 16-job anchor workload, it preserves 59,743,936 decoding events while achieving a 24.0x host-side speedup, and recurrent simulations scale beyond 1.22 billion events. Across 17 reference configurations, the automatics taged-fluid mode yields a mean makespan error of 2.60% and a worst-case error of 6.45%. Design-space studies reveal transfer-limited resource matching,decoder-driven pipeline stalls, and saturation of dedicated resources under microsecond-scale QEC cycles.

Problem

• Quantum Error Correction
• Resource Contention
• Hybrid Quantum-Classical Systems
• Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing
• System-Level Simulation

Innovation

• Streaming Quantum Error Correction
• Certified Recurrence
• Staged-Fluid Simulation
• System-Level QEC Simulator
• Resource-Constrained Pipeline