PESOSE Track 1 · Scoping a secure open-source ecosystem
A quantum computer only returns trustworthy answers if the compiler that lowers a circuit to hardware preserves its behavior on a noisy device. Today that layer is fragmented across vendor stacks, and its noise models are blind to execution-dependent error. QForge turns robustness tooling into shared, secure, vendor-neutral infrastructure.
01 / The problem we scope
Production quantum compilers model noise as calibration-derived costs on individual gates. They miss execution context: short, ordered gate sequences on specific physical-qubit neighborhoods that inflate error even when every gate is well calibrated. A four-gate pattern on a coupled pair, with no unusual per-gate error, measurably degrades results.
The seed tool, QRisk, isolates these recurring patterns from real hardware and links their removal to 24–45% lower excess error across three IBM Heron r2 backends. But a mitigation discovered in one lab does not become infrastructure the field can reuse and trust — there is no vendor-neutral pass interface, no governance, and no security model for a compiler pass whose correctness is statistical and drifts with calibration. QForge is a one-year effort to scope that ecosystem: architecture, governance and licensing, a security and provenance plan, and a community strategy.
02 / Founding projects
Reliable quantum compilation is a pipeline. Each founding project owns one stage; together they are the starting point QForge builds a governed ecosystem around.
Mines recurring, backend-specific abnormal circuit patterns from real hardware runs, validates them by independent rediscovery across calibration windows, and removes them with semantics-preserving compiler passes. The seed artifact of QForge.
View repository ↗Generates semantics-preserving program variants and differentially tests them across quantum software stacks with distribution-aware equivalence checks — the basis for an oracle that tells a sound pass from a poisoned one.
View repository ↗Isolates failures in multi-layer extensible compilation. Its quantum-integration track shrinks a failing circuit and its compiler-pass sequence down to the minimal, actionable reproduction a maintainer needs.
View repository ↗A traceable mutation engine. Its quantum-integration track generates quantum-aware mutants that measure whether the test suites guarding the pipeline actually catch regressions, and surface the gaps.
View repository ↗03 / Building the ecosystem
Track 1 funds planning, not product: an open, vendor-neutral pass framework layered on existing interchange formats — a quantum IR (MLIR-style), OpenQASM 3, and QIR — plus the social structure a stochastic, hardware-coupled artifact needs before adoption scales.
A pass contract that separates portable transformation logic from backend-specific evidence, plugging into vendor pass managers such as Qiskit and t|ket⟩ rather than competing as a new IR.
An open, meritocratic charter and decision-rights matrix, a permissive core license paired with a Developer Certificate of Origin, and a data-sharing agreement for calibration-derived patterns.
A threat model for six risk classes, an equivalence oracle plus N-of-M independent cross-window rediscovery as the trust floor, and every accepted pass signed and published with an SBOM and validation evidence.
Explicit user and contributor funnels, a Robustness Pass Challenge built on QASMBench and the pattern database, and research experiences across three universities, two of them Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
04 / The ecosystem
QForge is not another compiler. It layers on the interfaces vendors already ship — one shared pass abstraction above Qiskit, t|ket⟩, and the NISQ hardware beneath them.
A robustness mitigation written once against that abstraction runs everywhere. The ecosystem serves algorithm researchers, tool vendors, national labs and HPC centers, and educators — anyone who needs a compiler pass they did not write to be one they can trust.
Led by Tulane University with the University of Arizona and the University of California, Riverside.