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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>X (Q. Tran);</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>dqsweep: Parameter Sweeps for Benchmarking Distributed Quantum Computing Applications</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Quang-Phong Tran</string-name>
          <email>quang.tran@iit.cnr.it</email>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Claudio Cicconetti</string-name>
          <email>c.cicconetti@iit.cnr.it</email>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Marco Conti</string-name>
          <email>m.conti@iit.cnr.it</email>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Andrea Passarella</string-name>
          <email>a.passarella@iit.cnr.it</email>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="editor">
          <string-name>Distributed Quantum Computing, Quantum Benchmarking, Quantum Network Simulation</string-name>
        </contrib>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2025</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>000</volume>
      <fpage>0</fpage>
      <lpage>0003</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>Distributed quantum computing is a promising approach for deploying quantum technologies in HighPerformance Computing infrastructures by pooling the resources of clusters of quantum processor units. However, the performance of an application in such a system depends on a large set of hardware and network parameters that are dificult to explore manually. Quantum network simulators provide a simulation environment, but they require users to write ad hoc scripts for each sweep and then post-process the data. We propose dqsweep, an open-source framework that automates this process and can provide new insights into the application's performance. A single command line runs exhaustive parameter sweeps, produces heat maps, and correlations ready to use. We have evaluated the framework on two distributed protocols for the nonlocal CNOT gate, implemented via a Two Teledata vs. Telegate approach, and a distributed Grover algorithm on two qubits and three qubits.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>Applications</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>
        Big data applications require High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures to tame the inherent
size and complexity through the concurrent use of a vast number of computation/storage/network
elements tightly interconnected. Quantum computing is an emerging technology with the potential to
play a significant role in big data and HPC, but today still sufers from limitations in terms of noise
and small scale. The latter can be overcome through Distributed Quantum Computing (DQC), where
resources of clusters of Quantum Processor Units (QPUs) are pooled together [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. These QPUs, which
can be integrated into HPC facilities [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ], can communicate and share information to combine their
independent results and achieve a computation in a network that spans a range from short to possibly
long distances. A recent experimental demonstration of DQC has shown promising results [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ], notably
the realization of the teleportation of a CZ gate with 86% fidelity and a distributed Grover on two qubits
with 71% success rate. However, DQC encounters all the challenges associated with distributed classical
systems, as well as new ones, such as the decoherence of qubits in memories, which sets a hard limit on
the time available for a computation task, and the inherent fragility of entanglement distribution over
a quantum network, which cannot rely on Forward Error Correction (FEC) and bufering due to the
no-cloning theorem [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>Given the technology’s early stage, it is challenging to assess the performance of a distributed
quantum application in a specific DQC system, as it combines multiple computing and networking
parameters with possibly diferent hardware and network topologies. Quantifying the relative influence
of one parameter on the system performance, compared to the others, is essential for the exploration
of DQC capabilities. It can also help to design optimized distributed quantum applications, such as
large-scale quantum circuits, and facilitate defining minimum requirements for each criterion to run
(A. Passarella)</p>
      <p>CEUR
Workshop</p>
      <p>ISSN1613-0073
a distributed quantum application in a future real DQC system, thereby bridging the gap between
theoretical and experimental values. However, there are no tools readily available for this crucial task.</p>
      <p>To fill this gap, we propose a framework, called dqsweep, built on top of a widely adopted quantum
network simulation tool (Netsquid/SquidASM), for the automated evaluation of the performance of
distributed quantum applications. The main contributions are:
– Automatic generation of the combinations of specified parameters with a range of values, parallel
execution of the simulations, and visualization of the results.
– Single command-line to sweep network and hardware parameters and reveal how they afect the
system performance, in terms of fidelity and latency
– Use case validation: evaluation of the performance of two nonlocal CNOT gate protocols (Two</p>
      <p>Teledata vs. Telegate) and a distributed Grover on two qubits vs. three qubits with noisy hardware.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. Background and related work</title>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>2.1. Distributed Quantum Computing</title>
        <p>
          Quantum computing promises to solve some complex problems faster than a classical computer by
leveraging quantum mechanics principles. However, in practice, a quantum computer is highly
susceptible to errors due to decoherence and noise, which limits the size of the input and, consequently,
the problems that can be solved on it. Quantum Error Correction (QEC) mechanisms exist to detect
and correct errors [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
          ], but implementing a “clean” logical qubit requires many noisy qubits, which are
a scarce resource today. DQC is an alternative approach that aims to scale the number of qubits [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
          ]
and achieves fault-tolerant quantum computation. Clusters of QPUs can be interconnected on a single
chip/board (similar to classical multi-core CPUs) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3 ref7">3, 7</xref>
          ] or they might be part of a geographical network
(quantum internet)[
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref8">1, 8</xref>
          ].
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>2.2. Nonlocal Gates</title>
        <p>
          Some quantum operations, specifically nonlocal gates, may be involved in distributing an initial
monolithic quantum circuit across multiple QPUs. These operations, specifically the multi-qubit gates, that
could be engaged between multiple QPUs, are costly in terms of resources. Consequently, one of the
main challenges of DQC is to propose an optimal implementation of nonlocal gates and minimize their
use in distributed quantum applications. In quantum computing, the controlled-NOT gate (CNOT) is
an essential two-qubit gate because all single-qubit gates with this gate have been demonstrated to
be universal [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
          ]. This means that implementing a nonlocal CNOT gate could (in theory) enable the
implementation of any distributed quantum computation. The CNOT gate flips the target qubit, noted
| ⟩, if and only if the control qubit, noted | ⟩, is in state |1⟩.
        </p>
        <p>
          One possible implementation of this gate uses two quantum teleportations (or two teledata). This
method can be used to implement any two-qubit gate. It consumes two bits of classical communication
in each direction and two shared ebits, as shown in Figure 1 (left). The need for two teleportations and
a SWAP gate arises because after Alice teleports her data qubit, she no longer has this qubit after the
measurement, so Bob needs to send back the initial qubit to her. Another possible implementation is
to teleport the gate (telegate). One bit of classical communication in each direction and one shared
ebit are necessary and suficient to implement the nonlocal CNOT gate [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ]. This implementation
uses two primitive operations, the cat-entangler that takes an arbitrary control qubit  |0⟩ +  |1⟩ and a
maximally entangled pair 1 (|00⟩ + |11⟩) and transforms them into a cat-like state  |00⟩ +  |11⟩ and
√2
the cat-disentangler, which is the inverse operation [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
          ], illustrated in the circuit (Figure 1, right side).
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-3">
        <title>2.3. Quantum Benchmarking</title>
        <p>
          Quantum benchmarking is a reproducible evaluation method to assess the performance of a quantum
setup. It is a well-studied field, and there are multiple types of quantum benchmarking [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
          ]. Significant





Cat Disentangler
|  ⊕   ⟩
success rate of an application, rather than the performance of a single, isolated hardware component.
Then create an ad hoc script to sweep the parameters on a range of values, run the simulation manually
a specified number of times, and present the statistical results with accompanying figures. This process
is error-prone and time-consuming, depending on factors such as the number of applications, diferent
network topologies, or parameter ranges.
        </p>
        <p>
          There is a shortage of tools that combine the benchmarking of quantum computing and networking.
To the best of our knowledge, the only tool has been provided by Liao et al. [26], who have performed
a comparison study of a selection of quantum network protocols using NetSquid [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
          ]. However,
the software is designed for security-oriented applications and does not fit generic DQC, which has
motivated us to develop dqsweep.
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3. Methodology</title>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>3.1. dqsweep framework</title>
        <p>
          dqsweep is a flexible framework that analyzes the performance of distributed quantum applications
by sweeping quantum network and hardware parameters. The code is open-source and available on
GitHub1 (more DQC applications are provided in addition to the ones evaluated here). To simulate
quantum networks, we used Netsquid (a network simulator using discrete events) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
          ] and SquidASM
(an extension of Netsquid)2. dqsweep was written in Python 3.10 (but works with higher versions)
and requires Netsquid credentials to be used. The quantum network can be represented as either a
YAML file or an object of type StackNetworkConfig. It comprises multiple hardware parameters (T1,
T2, gate execution times, noise model, ...) and network parameters (quantum nodes, quantum channel
configurations, and classical channel configurations).
        </p>
        <p>To evaluate these parameters given a distributed quantum application, the framework gives two
primary performance indicators. Firstly, we use fidelity  , with 0 ≤  ≤ 1 , a common quantitative
measure, to quantify the accuracy of a quantum system by comparing two quantum states (e.g., final
state vs. expected state), defined as density matrices. Typically, a fidelity of 1 means that the two
quantum states are identical, while 0 means completely orthogonal. It is used to evaluate the usefulness
and reliability of a DQC application. We define the average fidelity as follows:</p>
        <p>1
 =1
  =
∑(Tr(    ) + 2√(
 )(  ))
where  is the total number of simulations,   is the expected density matrix and   the output density
matrix for simulation  . Secondly, we measure latency, which is another critical indicator that has an
important impact on the feasibility and performance of an application. In particular, due to decoherence,
a high latency (e.g, classical communication latency, duration to successfully generate entanglement
pairs, or gate times) could result in impracticality of a quantum protocol or poor outcomes. Therefore,
we define the average latency as follows:</p>
        <p>1
 =1
  =
∑( end −  s(t)art)</p>
        <p>()
()</p>
        <p>()
where  start and  end are the start and end times of simulation  , respectively.</p>
        <p>A quantum network is associated with a quantum application to assess its performance. For each
batch of experiments, dqsweeep performs the following operations:
1. Load the quantum network configuration ( --config) and create the simulated quantum network.
2. Generate all combinations of values of the given parameters (--sweep_params) by sweeping specified
ranges of values (--ranges).</p>
        <p>--num_experiments).
3. Run the quantum distributed quantum application (--experiment) in parallel via
multiprocessing (ProcessPoolExecutor) for each combination a certain amount of times (--epr_rounds,
4. Store the results and generate three types of output:
– A CSV file with the raw results that contains, for each row, the name of the parameters given
in input associated with each swept value, and the list of fidelity/latency results, together with
average and standard deviation.
– Heat map plots, for all the performance indicators, for each value of the swept parameter.
– A TXT file with the Pearson correlation for each parameter on the average fidelity and latency.
dqsweep is designed to be extensible and flexible. Users can define their quantum applications using
modular classes in Python for Netsquid/SquidASM, with the condition that the results are fidelity and
latency, as described above. The applications can be associated with a network topology by a YAML
configuration or a Python object. The parameter sweeps accept any parameters with any corresponding
valid range of values that are supported by the simulators and defined in the initial setup. This design
makes dqsweep suitable for a wide range of research tasks involving the exploration of a large set of
parameters in DQC.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>3.2. Quantum Network and Noise Model</title>
        <p>∈ {, }
( ).</p>
        <p>To evaluate our framework, we designed a quantum network with two quantum nodes, Alice ( ) and
Bob ( ). Each quantum node has two qubits, one data qubit (denoted   for Alice and   for Bob) and one
communication qubit (denoted   for Alice and   for Bob) where the Hilbert space ℋ = ℂ
2 ⊗ ℂ
2 with
. Each is a generic device that implements the following set of gates  : Pauli gates ( ,  , 
),
rotational gates (  ,   ,   ), the Hadamard gate ( ), controlled NOT gate ( 
) and controlled Z gate
(1)
(2)</p>
        <p>For these devices, we used a noise model that gradually increases the probability of depolarization
of single-qubit gates, noted   ∈ {0, ..., 0.05}, and the probability of depolarization of two-qubit gates,
noted   ∈ {0, ..., 0.05}. The experiment starts with an initial pure state | 0⟩. The corresponding density
matrix is defined as:  0 = | 0⟩ ⟨ 0| with  0 &gt; 0 and tr( 0) = 1. Suppose, for instance, that the system’s
evolution is described by the unitary operator  ∈  . After evolution, the initial state | 0⟩ will be in the
state  | 0⟩. This evolution is described by  0 −→  
0
will use the following notation for the single qubit depolarizing channel [27]:
 †. Next, to describe the noise of the system, we

ℰ  () = (1 −   ) +
3
  (  +   +   )
(, ) ∈ {0, 1, 2, 3} 2 ∖ {(0, 0)}as:
mixed state for   = 1 with ℰ1() = 2
with  0 =  ,  1 =  ,  2 =  and  3 =  .</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-3">
        <title>3.3. Experimental Setup</title>
        <p>When   = 0, ℰ0 =  , which is the identity channel, a noise-free quantum channel. For slight
depolarizing noise, where   ≃ 0, the channel remains nearly identical to the identity channel. However,
when the depolarizing noise increases, the qubit depolarizes and is entirely replaced by a maximally
. Secondly, we defined the two-qubit depolarizing channel with
ℰ  () = (1 − 15
16   ) +
 
16 (,)
∑(  ⊗   )(  ⊗   )
(3)
(4)
We evaluate dqsweep on MacBook Air (2020), Apple M1, 8GB, to test the framework on four distributed
quantum applications: a comparison of two protocols (Two Teledata vs. Telegate) that distribute a
nonlocal CNOT gate, presented in section 2, and a performance analysis of distributed Grover on two
qubits compared to its version on three qubits. We now briefly present the goal of Grover’s algorithm
[28], which is to find an element  in an unsorted database. In our evaluation, we assume that there
is only one element to search for. We can formulate the search problem as follows: given a boolean
function  () ∶ {0, 1}  → {0, 1}, find  such that  () = {
, where  ∈ {0, 1}  . To solve this
1 if  = 
0 else  ≠ 
problem classically, it requires querying the oracle in the worst case Θ( ) and on average ( )
with 
the total number of elements in the database. Instead, with Grover’s algorithm, there is a quadratic gain,
since the algorithm queries ( √) times. The distributed version of Grover’s algorithm implemented in
dqsweep is a basic implementation that searches the state  = |11⟩; it requires distributing two nonlocal
controlled Z gates (CZ) on two qubits and two nonlocal CCZ gates on three qubits. The circuit on two
qubits is represented in Figure 2.
represents the state of the data qubit of Alice and Bob, respectively. |  ⟩ , |  ⟩ represents the state of the
communication qubit of Alice and Bob, respectively.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4. Results</title>
      <p>
        We focus on two types of DQC applications: nonlocal CNOT gates (two protocols) and distributed
Grover’s algorithm (on two and three qubits). We study these protocols because distributed nonlocal
gates are crucial for the realization of DQC. By benchmarking them, dqsweep can highlight protocol-level
trade-ofs. In addition, we evaluate a distributed Grover algorithm (real-world quantum application)
that has been experimentally implemented [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] on two qubits; thus, by using dqsweep we can investigate
the impacts of scalability and compare to the actual experimental values. The results below highlight
how noise parameters afect fidelity and demonstrate the kinds of insights our framework can extract
automatically.
      </p>
      <p>The fidelity results are presented in Figures 3–6 in four heat maps and a correlation Table 1, where
depolarizing probability   . A square characterizes the result of the average fidelity   = 1
the  axis represents the single qubit gate depolarizing probability   and the  axis the two qubit gate
∑
=1  (  ,   )
from Eq. (1) with  the total number of simulations of the given (  ,   ) with   =   and   =   . Along


with each average fidelity, the sample standard deviation is provided, noted  =
the observed value of a sample,  ̄ is the mean value of observations, and N is the number of observations.
In addition, for every pair of probabilities (  ,   ), which comprised a total of 225 combinations, the
simulation was run 1,000 (100) times for distributed CNOT gates (distributed Grover), each consisting
√
 −1

∑ (  −)̄ 2 , where   is
gate depolarizing probability   of distributed CNOT using two teledata.</p>
      <p>Based on the heat maps, we observe that the maximum average fidelity, with the parameters (  ,   ) =
(0, 0), corresponding to no noise, is 1.0 for the CNOT two teledata, CNOT telegate, distributed Grover
on two qubits, and 0.94 for distributed Grover on three qubits. The minimum average fidelity, with the
parameters (  ,   ) = (0.05, 0.05), corresponding to the “maximum” noise, is 0.87, 0.89, 0.57, 0.14 for the
two teledata, telegate, Grover on two qubits, and Grover on three qubits, respectively.</p>
      <p>Furthermore, dqsweep gives the Pearson Correlation Coeficient (PCC), noted  , defined as follows
for the single qubit depolarizing probability   ,    ,  =</p>
      <p>cov(  ,  ) and conversely for the two qubit
depolarizing probability   ,    ,  =
is the standard deviation of   and   
cov( 
  
 

,  ) where cov is the covariance,   is the average fidelity,   
is the standard deviation of   . The results are in the Table 1.
PCC table between each parameter on the average fidelity of each distributed application</p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>Parameters</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>Teledata</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>Telegate</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-4">
        <title>Grover-2</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-5">
        <title>Grover-3</title>
        <p>Single qubit depolarizing probability (  )
Two qubit depolarizing probability (  )
-0.439
-0.895
-0.452
-0.887
-0.876
-0.468
-0.559
-0.565</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>5. Discussion and limitations</title>
      <p>The results highlight several key aspects of the design and performance of distributed quantum
applications. First, the correlation Table 1 shows that the two distributed protocols rely heavily on the
two-qubit gates, and thus the degradation of the fidelity depends mainly on the noise of these gates.
The telegate protocol exhibits slightly better fidelity than the teledata protocol, while also consuming
fewer resources (only one ebit and two bits); therefore, this protocol appears to be the one preferred
for distributing nonlocal gates. In contrast to the distributed gate protocols, the distributed Grover
protocol on two qubits shows that single-qubit gate noise has a more significant impact on fidelity, while
two-qubit gate noise has a moderate efect with the additional two nonlocal CZ gates. The distributed
Grover on three qubits requires distributing two nonlocal CZZ gates, which involves four EPR pairs
and several Tofoli gates (in the implementation, a composition of rotational gates with CNOT gates).
By increasing the size by one qubit, the fidelity drops significantly to around 0.66 with   ≥ 0.004 and
  ≥ 0.004, by a factor of 6 compared to Grover-2, which lost only around 5%. This is because the circuit
depth is larger, and distributing a multi-qubit gate is costly. Each time a control qubit is added, an EPR
pair needs to be generated, and more quantum operations are necessary to implement the multi-qubit
gate.</p>
      <p>Without dqsweep, exploring 225 combinations of noise parameters for each application would require
extensive custom scripting and post-processing. The framework automates this process and enables
direct visualization and statistical analysis. While dqsweep provides a new framework for benchmarking
distributed quantum applications, the major limitation of our tool is that it relies on simulation, so there
is still a need to experiment with real hardware to obtain accurate values for each parameter. Another
possible improvement would be to integrate automatic circuit partitioning, a compiler that partitions a
monolithic circuit across QPUs, instead of breaking it up manually. Finally, future work could develop
a framework that provides the optimal configuration for a particular application with fixed parameters,
or a specific given network, or specific requirements (e.g., the application needs a 95% fidelity; what is
the minimal configuration?).</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>6. Conclusion</title>
      <p>In this paper, we presented dqsweep, a flexible framework for performance analysis of a given distributed
quantum application. By using Netsquid/SquidASM, dqsweep, in one command line, generates all the
combinations of hardware and network parameters (specified in input), simulates the distributed
quantum application in parallel for each combination, and produces heat maps, correlations, and a
CSV raw results. This automation significantly reduces the experimental efort to analyze the impact
of hundreds of possible configurations. It can also provide new perspectives (e.g., helpful windows)
on application performance by comparing it at the same scale (range of parameters, range of values,
heat maps) and the same statistical setup (number of EPR rounds, number of simulations). As a use
case, we have evaluated two distributed protocols of the nonlocal CNOT gate and the distributed
Grover algorithm on two qubits versus three qubits. One notable result is that, when the depolarizing
probabilities are 0.4%, the fidelity of the distributed Grover on three qubits drops by a factor of 6
compared to its version on two qubits.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>Acknowledgments</title>
      <p>The work of C. Cicconetti was supported by the European Union – Next Generation EU under the
Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.3, CUP
B93C22000620006, National Center for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing “ICSC”(CN00000013).
The work of M. Conti and A. Passarella was funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU
under the NRRP, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.3, CUP B53C22003970001, partnership on
“Telecommunications of the Future” (PE00000001 “RESTART”, Spoke 1).</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>Declaration on Generative AI</title>
      <p>The authors have not employed any Generative AI tools.
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