COSMA: Communication-aware Optimization of Fermionic Simulation Kernels for Modular Quantum Architectures

Quantum simulation is a leading application of quantum computing, but scaling to chemically relevant problems requires modular architectures composed of interconnected quantum processing units. In such systems, inter-core quantum communication becomes a major performance bottleneck. In this work, we present COSMA, a communication-aware compilation framework for fermionic simulation kernels targeting modular quantum architectures. Our approach jointly optimizes fermion-to-qubit mapping, Pauli scheduling, and qubit allocation to minimize inter-core state transfers. Evaluated on molecular benchmarks, COSMA achieves up to 2.5times reduction in communication cost compared to state-of-the-art baselines, with a median improvement of 1.7times. These results demonstrate that cross-layer co-design is essential for efficient and scalable quantum simulation on multi-core quantum hardware.