QNodeOS claims to be the first operating system for quantum networks, paving the way for future quantum applications

Members of the Quantum Internet Alliance (QIA) from TU Delft, QuTech, University of Innsbruck, INRIA, and CNRS have published a research paper detailing what they bill as the world's first operating system, QNodeOS, designed for quantum networks (via Phys.org). QNodeOS is designed to be hardware-agnostic and strives to abstract away low-level details from programmers for easy application development and deployment. It is a platform-independent framework capable of executing applications in a quantum network using high-level programming languages.

It is important to understand that QNodeOS targets quantum networks, rather than quantum computers. Put simply, quantum computers or processors like Microsoft's latest Majorana 1 chip are built to perform computations using the laws of quantum physics, such as entanglement and superposition. In contrast, quantum networks connect these quantum devices, facilitating coordination and are key for distributed quantum computing.

Quantum networks require an operating system to manage the flow of quantum information, manage entanglement, and synchronize all connected devices. Previous designs of quantum network applications relied on ad hoc, hardware-specific software, which was limited in functionality and lacked user-friendliness. Consider it the classical equivalent of low-level programming languages. High-level languages provide microarchitectural abstraction, enabling code portability across different designs. The quantum computing field requires similar advancements as Mariagrazia Luliano from QuTech explains: "The system is like the software on your computer at home: You don't need to know how the hardware works to use it."

The paper details how QNodeOS is compatible with different quantum chip designs: trapped ion processors and diamond color center (NV) based systems. Moreover, the platform supports multitasking for maximum hardware resource usage and efficiency. From what we can infer, this is done by translating high-level code to low-level NetQASM, which is then converted into hardware-specific instructions using what the paper defines as a QDriver.

The team demonstrated QNodeOS on two quantum nodes based on NV centers in diamonds, each with a single qubit. High-level instructions, explicitly mentioned as arbitrary, were executed following a basic QDC protocol in which a client node sends instructions to a server node.

This is the first implementation of high-level programming and execution of quantum network applications. The research further details long-distance connectivity measures to improve the architecture and reduce latency.