COSMA: Communication-aware Optimization of Fermionic Simulation Kernels for Modular Quantum Architectures

Abstract

Quantum simulation is a leading application of quantum computing, but scaling to chemically relevant problems requires modular architectures composed of interconnected quantum processing units. In such systems, inter-core quantum communication becomes a major performance bottleneck. In this work, we present COSMA, a communication-aware compilation framework for fermionic simulation kernels targeting modular quantum architectures. Our approach jointly optimizes fermion-to-qubit mapping, Pauli scheduling, and qubit allocation to minimize inter-core state transfers. Evaluated on molecular benchmarks, COSMA achieves up to $2.5\times$ reduction in communication cost compared to state-of-the-art baselines, with a median improvement of $1.7\times$. These results demonstrate that cross-layer co-design is essential for efficient and scalable quantum simulation on multi-core quantum hardware.

Accepted at IEEE QCE 2026