QuRE: The Quantum Resource Estimator toolbox

Abstract

We describe QuRE, the Quantum Resource Estimator. QuRE is a layout estimation tool that estimates the cost of practical implementations of quantum circuits in a variety of competing physical quantum technologies and with a variety of strategies for fault tolerant encoding. For each specified algorithm, QuRE estimates quantities such as number of physical qubits, execution time, probability of success of the computation, and physical gate counts for elementary quantum gate types of a specified technology. Out of the box, QuRE supports estimation for six physical quantum technologies, seven quantum algorithms, and with error correction using the Steane [1], [2], Bacon-Shor [3], Knill [4] or surface [5], [6] error correction codes. Moreover, QuRE is extendable and can easily accommodate other choices. After describing QuRE, we use it to investigate the tradeoff between concatenated and surface error correction coding techniques, demonstrating the existence of a crossover point for the Ground State Estimation Algorithm [7].