Fig. 1: Application paradigm.
From: An operating system for executing applications on quantum network nodes
A quantum networking application consists of several programs, each running on one of the end nodes59. An end node is a device in a quantum network that executes user applications. A network stack enables entanglement generation between end nodes over a quantum network (Supplementary Fig. 1). The distinct programs at each end node can only interact through: (1) quantum communication (for example, entanglement generation) and (2) classical communication. This allows a programmer to realize security-sensitive applications but prohibits a global orchestration of the quantum execution, such as what we might do in (distributed) quantum computing70 in which a single quantum program is executed on several nodes. Our architecture allows programs to be written in high-level quantum-hardware-independent software and executed on a quantum-hardware-independent system that controls a hardware-dependent system (QDevice; Fig. 2), such as a NV centre node with a diamond chip (photo taken by authors, left images) or a trapped-ion quantum node60 (right images). These platforms constitute physically very different QDevice systems but can both be programmed by our architecture.
