QFaaS: A Serverless Function-as-a-Service Framework for Quantum Computing

Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in quantum hardware are creating opportunities for its use in many applications. However, quantum software engineering is still in its infancy with many challenges, especially dealing with the diversity of quantum programming languages and hardware platforms. To alleviate these challenges, we propose QFaaS, a novel Quantum Function-as-a-Service framework, which leverages the advantages of the serverless model and the state-of-the-art software engineering approaches to advance practical quantum computing. Our framework provides essential components of a quantum serverless platform to simplify the software development and adapt to the quantum cloud computing paradigm, such as combining hybrid quantum-classical computation, containerizing functions, and integrating DevOps features. We design QFaaS as a unified quantum computing framework by supporting well-known quantum languages and software development kits (Qiskit, Q#, Cirq, and Braket), executing the quantum tasks on multiple simulators and quantum cloud providers (IBM Quantum and Amazon Braket). This paper proposes architectural design, principal components, the life cycle of hybrid quantum-classical function, operation workflow, and implementation of QFaaS. We present two practical use cases and perform the evaluations on quantum computers and simulators to demonstrate our framework's ability to ease the burden on traditional engineers to expedite the ongoing quantum software transition.