TOSCA4QC: Two Modeling Styles for TOSCA to Automate the Deployment and Orchestration of Quantum Applications

Quantum computing introduces a new computing paradigm that promises to solve problems that cannot be solved by classical computers efficiently. Thus, quantum applications will be more and more integrated in classical applications. To bring these composite applications into production, technologies for an automated deployment and orchestration are required to avoid manual error-prone and time-consuming processes. For non-quantum applications, a variety of deployment technologies have been developed in recent years. However, the deployment of quantum applications currently differs significantly from non-quantum applications and thus, leads to a different modeling procedure for the deployment of quantum applications. To overcome these problems, we propose TOSCA4QC that introduces two deployment modeling styles based on the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) standard for automating the deployment and orchestration of quantum applications: (i) SDK-specific modeling style to cover all technical deployment details and (ii) SDK-agnostic modeling style supporting common modeling principles. We further show how existing model-driven development (MDD) approach can be applied to refine a SDK-agnostic model to an executable SDK-specific model. We demonstrate the practical feasibility by a prototypical implementation as an extension of the TOSCA ecosystem OpenTOSCA and three case studies with IBMQ and a quantum simulator.