Quality Attributes on Quantum Computing Platforms

Abstract: As the practical Quantum Computing Platforms (QCPs) rapidly become a reality, it is desirable to harness their true potential in software applications. Thus it becomes important to determine the implications of QCPs for software architecture. In this paper we present the in-depth examination of state-of-the-art QCPs for identifying all such characteristics of a QCP that are relevant from software architecture perspective. Lack of a native quantum operating system, a hard dependency on quantum algorithms, the lower level of programming abstractions are few, out of many, examples of QCP characteristics which may affect architecture of quantum software applications. Key contributions of this paper include identifying: i) The general architecture of a QCP, ii) The programming model which is typically used when developing software for a QCP, iii) Architecturally significant characteristics of QCPs and iv) The impact of these characteristics on various Quality Attributes (QAs). We show that except performance and scalability, most of the other QAs (e.g. maintainability, testability, reliability etc.) are adversely affected by different characteristics of a QCP.