Snowflake: A Distributed Streaming Decoder

Quantum 10, 2033 (2026).

https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2026-03-20-2033

We design Snowflake, a quantum error correction decoder that, for the surface code under circuit-level noise, is roughly 25% more accurate than the Union-Find decoder, with a better mean runtime scaling: subquadratic as opposed to cubic in the code distance. Our decoder runs in a streaming fashion and has a distributed, local implementation. In designing Snowflake, we propose a new method for general stream decoding that eliminates the processing overhead due to window overlap in existing windowing methods.