Actis: A Strictly Local Union-Find Decoder

Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires classical hardware to perform the decoding necessary for error correction. The Union- Find decoder is one of the best candidates for this. It has remarkably organic characteristics, involving the growth and merger of data structures through nearestneighb our steps; this naturally suggests the possibility of its realisation using a lattice of simple processors with nearestneighb our links. In this way the computational load can be distributed with near-ideal parallelism. Here we show for the first time that this strict (rather than partial) locality is practical, with a worst-case runtime O(d3) and mean runtime subquadratic in the surface code distance d. A novel parity-calculation scheme is employed which can simplify previously proposed architectures, and our approach is optimised for circuit-level noise. We compare our local realisation with one augmented by long-range links; while the latter is of course faster, we note that local asynchronous logic could negate the difference.