Middleware for distributing computation to lower-power quantum nodes

The rapid advancement of quantum computing has created a significant demand for quantum resources; however, the current landscape is characterized by a limited number of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices with restricted qubit counts and high operational costs. To fully exploit the potential of these technologies, especially in emerging edge-computing scenarios, this thesis proposes a hardware-agnostic Quantum Middleware that acts as an orchestration layer for distributed, heterogeneous quantum resources. This middleware decouples logical circuit definitions from physical execution, enabling seamless deployment across diverse backends, from cloud-hosted quantum processors to local, room-temperature devices. The proposed solution leverages quantum circuit cutting via quasiprobability decomposition to execute workloads that exceed the physical capacity of a single Quantum Processing Unit (QPU). The platform is built on the Qiskit framework and ensures interoperability by adopting OpenQASM as a standard intermediate representation. To demonstrate its practical application, this thesis also includes the integration of a self-hosted, diamond Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) center-based quantum computer into the middleware ecosystem. The platform was evaluated by executing the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for the Max-Cut problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the middleware successfully executed 2-qubit quantum programs on a single-qubit physical NV center device, identifying the optimal solution in 70% of the runs. Additionally, scalability and backend-agnosticism were verified through a 4-qubit experiment executed on a 2-qubit classical simulator, demonstrating the seamless transition between heterogeneous backends. These findings confirm the viability of the proposed virtualization layer and highlight the potential of circuit cutting to extend the capabilities of near-term quantum hardware within a distributed edge-cloud continuum.