XACC (pronounced as it’s spelled) is an extensible compilation framework for hybrid quantum-classical computing architectures. It provides extensible language frontend and hardware backend compilation components glued together via a novel, polymorphic quantum intermediate representation. XACC currently supports quantum-classical programming and enables the execution of quantum kernels on IBM, Rigetti, IonQ, and D-Wave QPUs, as well as a number of quantum computer simulators.
The XACC programming model follows the traditional co-processor model, akin to OpenCL or CUDA for GPUs, but takes into account the subtleties and complexities inherent to the interplay between classical and quantum hardware. XACC provides a high-level API that enables classical applications to offload work (represented as quantum kernels) to an attached quantum accelerator in a manner that is independent to the quantum programming language and hardware. This enables one to write quantum code once, and perform benchmarking, verification and validation, and performance studies for a set of virtual (simulators) or physical hardware.
