NetQMPI: a practical MPI-inspired library for distributed quantum computing over NetQASM SDK

Distributed quantum computing (DQC) is emerging as a practical solution to overcome the scalability limits of individual quantum processors by interconnecting them via quantum networks. However, programming such systems remains a significant challenge due to the need to coordinate quantum operations, manage entanglement, and synchronize classical communication. This paper proposes NetQMPI as a Python library that enables high-level programming of distributed quantum applications by building on top of two key foundations: NetQASM, which abstracts the physical network layer to interface with quantum nodes and simulators such as NetSquid and SimulaQron; and NetQIR, which proposes a layered abstraction model suitable for defining a quantum version of the classical Message Passing Interface (MPI). NetQMPI provides an MPI-style programming model tailored to quantum systems. It introduces primitives such as qsend and qrecv that abstract quantum communication details like entanglement generation, and protocols. Collective operations such as qscatter or qgather are also included. This allows developers to focus on distributed algorithm design while relying on NetQMPI to handle low-level operations efficiently.