Snowflake: A Distributed Streaming Decoder
arXiv:2406.01701 · doi:10.22331/q-2026-03-20-2033
Abstract
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.
14+5 pages, 11+7 figures; expand Background, formalise definitions, analyse decoding latency, describe noise model used, update Competing Interests and References
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