Quantum-HPC Software Stacks and the openQSE Reference Architecture: A Survey
Published in ArXiv, 2026.
Quantum resources are increasingly integrated into high-performance computing and cloud environments, but quantum-HPC software stacks remain isolated, often proprietary, full-stack solutions lacking common interfaces across runtime, resource management, orchestration, and execution layers. This survey reviews nine production stacks, maps recurring design patterns and deployment choices, and identifies shared gaps in runtime abstraction, scheduling/resource management, interconnect semantics, and observability. It introduces the openQSE reference architecture with explicit layer boundaries so implementations can interoperate while preserving deployment choice and supporting both NISQ-era workloads and future FTQC systems without changing upper-layer application interfaces.
