Quantum-HPC Software Stacks and the openQSE Reference Architecture: A Survey

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 22 Apr 2026] Quantum-HPC Software Stacks and the openQSE Reference Architecture: A Survey Amir Shehata, Brian Austin, Tom Beck, Lukas Burgholzer, Alex Chernoguzov, Spencer Churchill, Andrea Delgado, Yasuko Eckert, Jeffery Heckey, Kevin Kissell, Katherine Klymko, Josh Moles, Thomas Naughton, Lee James O'Riordan, Christian Ortiz Pauyac, Guen Prawiroatmodjo, Ermal Rrapaj, Jiri Schindler, Laura Schulz, Sebastian Stern, Tyler Takeshita, Miwako Tsuji, Aleksander Wennersteen, Travis Humble, Martin Schulz Quantum resources are increasingly integrated into high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud environments, but quantum high-performance computing (QHPC) software stacks remain isolated, often proprietary, full-stack solutions lacking common interfaces across runtime, resource management, orchestration, and execution layers. This paper analyzes nine production QHPC stacks and identifies common design patterns and emerging requirements, covering deployment models, application interaction patterns, SDK support, and readiness for fault-tolerant operation. The survey exposes consistent needs in runtime abstraction, resource management, interconnect semantics, and observability. Based on these findings, we propose the open quantum-HPC software ecosystem ( openQSE) reference architecture as a first step toward unifying the state-of-the-practice. openQSE defines a set of layer boundaries that allow different implementations to interoperate while preserving deployment flexibility, and is structured to support both current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) workloads and future fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) systems without changes to upper-layer application interfaces. Comments: 23 pages, 2 figures Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Emerging Technologies (cs.ET); Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2604.20912 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2604.20912v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.20912 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Amir Shehata [view email] [v1] Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:56:58 UTC (87 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.DC cs.ET cs.SE References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)