A Multilevel Framework for Partitioning Quantum Circuits
Quantum 10, 1984 (2026).
https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2026-01-22-1984
Executing quantum algorithms over distributed quantum systems requires quantum circuits to be divided into sub-circuits which communicate via entanglement-based teleportation. Naively mapping circuits to qubits over multiple quantum processing units (QPUs) results in large communication overhead, increasing both execution time and noise. This can be minimised by optimising the assignment of qubits to QPUs and the methods used for covering non-local operations. Formulations that are general enough to capture the spectrum of teleportation possibilities lead to complex problem instances which can be difficult to solve effectively. This highlights a need to exploit the wide range of heuristic techniques used in the graph partitioning literature. This paper formalises and extends existing constructions for graphical quantum circuit partitioning and designs a new objective function that captures further possibilities for non-local operations via $textit{nested state teleportation}$. We adapt the well-known Fiduccia-Mattheyses heuristic to the constraints and problem objective and explore multilevel techniques that coarsen hypergraphs and partition at multiple levels of granularity. We find that this reduces runtime and improves solution quality of standard partitioning. We place these techniques within a larger framework, through which we can extract full distributed quantum circuits including teleportation instructions. We compare the entanglement requirements and runtimes with state-of-the-art methods, finding that we achieve the lowest entanglement costs in most cases. Averaging over a wide range of circuits, we reduce the entanglement requirements by 35% compared with the next best-performing method. We also find that our techniques can scale to much larger circuit sizes than competing methods, provided the number of partitions is not too large.