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arXiv:2106.13995 · IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI

Fast quantum circuit simulation using hardware accelerated general purpose libraries

Oumarou Oumarou, Alexandru Paler, Robert Basmadjian

Published Jul 1, 2021• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum circuit simulators have a long tradition of exploiting massive hardware parallelism. Most of the times, parallelism has been supported by special purpose libraries tailored specifically for the quantum circuits. Quantum circuit simulators are integral part of quantum software stacks, which are mostly written in Python. Our focus has been on ease of use, implementation and maintainability within the Python ecosystem. We report the performance gains we obtained by using CuPy, a general purpose library (linear algebra) developed specifically for CUDA-based GPUs, to simulate quantum circuits. For supremacy circuits the speedup is around 2x, and for quantum multipliers almost 22x compared to state-of-the-art C++-based simulators.

DOI
10.1109/isvlsi51109.2021.00086

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Quantum circuit simulators have a long tradition of exploiting massive hardware parallelism. Most of the times, parallelism has been supported by special purpose libraries tailored specifically for the quantum circuits. Quantum circuit simulators are integral part of quantum software stacks, which are mostly written in Python. Our focus has been on ease of use, implementation and maintainability within the Python ecosystem. We report the performance gains we obtained by using CuPy, a general purpose library (linear algebra) developed specifically for CUDA-based GPUs, to simulate quantum circuits. For supremacy circuits the speedup is around 2x, and for quantum multipliers almost 22x compared to state-of-the-art C++-based simulators.
We present the NVIDIA cuQuantum SDK [1], a state-of-the-art library of composable primitives for GPU-accelerated quantum circuit simulations. As the size of quantum devices continues to increase, making their classical simulation progressively more difficult, the availability of fast and scalable quantum circuit simulators becomes vital for quantum algorithm developers, as well as quantum hardware engineers focused on the validation and optimization of quantum devices. The cuQuantum SDK was created to accelerate and scale up quantum circuit simulators developed by the quantum information science community by enabling them to utilize efficient scalable software building blocks optimized for NVIDIA GPU-based platforms. The functional building blocks provided cover the needs of both state vector- and tensor network- based simulators, including approximate tensor network simulation methods based on matrix product state, projected entangled pair state, and other factorized tensor representations. By leveraging the enormous computing power of the latest NVIDIA GPU architectures, quantum circuit simulators that have adopted the cuQuantum SDK demonstrate significant acceleration, compared to CPU-only execution, for both the state vector and tensor network simulation methods. Furthermore, by utilizing the parallel primitives available in the cuQuantum SDK, one can easily transition to distributed GPU-accelerated platforms, including those furnished by cloud service providers and high-performance computing systems deployed by supercomputing centers, extending the scale of possible quantum circuit simulations. The rich capabilities provided by the cuQuantum SDK are conveniently made available via both Python and C application programming interfaces, where the former is directly targeting a broad Python quantum community and the latter allows tight integration with simulators written in any programming language.
In this study, we introduce a novel implementation of Shor’s algorithm specifically designed for the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration framework. Our focus lies on achieving efficient execution of the modular multiplication circuit through GPU simulation. To seamlessly integrate our design into the PyQPanda library framework, we made necessary modifications, making a deliberate trade-off by sacrificing a small number of quantum resources to leverage the advantages of GPU acceleration. Subsequently, we conducted simulations and rigorously validated the functionality of our circuit using the PyQPanda library, resulting in a significant speedup compared to a central processing unit-only mode.
Classical simulation of quantum circuits remains indispensable for algorithm development, hardware validation, and error analysis in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. However, state-vector simulation faces exponential memory scaling, with an n-qubit system requiring O(2^n) complex amplitudes, and existing simulators often lack the flexibility to exploit heterogeneous computing resources at runtime. This paper presents a GPU-accelerated quantum circuit simulation framework that introduces three contributions: (1) an empirical backend selection algorithm that benchmarks CuPy, PyTorch-CUDA, and NumPy-CPU backends at runtime and selects the optimal execution path based on measured throughput; (2) a directed acyclic graph (DAG) based gate fusion engine that reduces circuit depth through automated identification of fusible gate sequences, coupled with adaptive precision switching between complex64 and complex128 representations; and (3) a memory-aware fallback mechanism that monitors GPU memory consumption and gracefully degrades to CPU execution when resources are exhausted. The framework integrates with Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane, and Amazon Braket through a unified adapter layer. Benchmarks on an NVIDIA A100-SXM4 (40 GiB) GPU demonstrate speedups of 64x to 146x over NumPy CPU execution for state-vector simulation of circuits with 20 to 28 qubits, with speedups exceeding 5x from 16 qubits onward. Hardware validation on an IBM quantum processing unit (QPU) confirms Bell state fidelity of 0.939, a five-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state fidelity of 0.853, and circuit depth reduction from 42 to 14 gates through the fusion pipeline. The system is designed for portability across NVIDIA consumer and data-center GPUs, requiring no vendor-specific compilation steps.
This work presents a portable, modular quantumcircuit emulator designed to accelerate algorithm prototyping by leveraging Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)-enabled Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) backends for dense linearalgebra workloads.The emulator provides a lightweight backend abstraction that unifies NumPy and CuPy, supports both statevector and density-matrix representations, and implements efficient multi-target unitary embedding and Kraus-map noise channels.These capabilities enable rapid exploration of quantum algorithms that require full 2 n × 2 n operators, such as quantum phase estimation, full Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), and noise-aware variational circuits, while minimizing host/device transfer and preserving numerical parity between backends.Implementation strategies are described for embedding single-and multi-qubit gates, parameterized rotations, and controlled unitaries, along with an "apply_unitary_on_targets" routine that employs reshape/matrix-multiply/reshape patterns to map arbitrary target sets to dense GPU kernels for high throughput.Using a curated benchmark suite of dense quantum workloads and microbenchmarks, including large matrix multiplies and Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), performance is quantified across a range of qubit counts and precisions.The results demonstrate substantial speedups on modern NVIDIA GPUs for workloads dominated by dense linear algebra, identify cross-over points where GPU acceleration becomes beneficial, and analyse memory/precision trade-offs for complex64 versus complex128.The presented emulator lowers the barrier for noise-aware algorithm prototyping by combining practical software ergonomics with GPU performance, enabling faster iteration on algorithm design and noise-mitigation strategies on commodity single-node hardware.While the abstraction layer ensures portability, achieving peak performance currently requires hardwarespecific tuning-a limitation we address through future automation strategies.
Developing state-of-the-art classical simulators of quantum circuits is of utmost importance to test and evaluate early quantum technology and understand the true potential of full-blown error-corrected quantum computers. In the past few years, multiple theoretical and numerical advances have continuously pushed the boundary of what is classically simulable, hence the development of a plethora of tools which are often limited to a specific purpose or designed for a particular hardware (e.g. CPUs vs. GPUs). Moreover, such tools are typically developed using tailored languages and syntax, which makes it hard to compare results from, and create hybrid approaches using, different simulation techniques. To support unified and optimized use of these techniques across platforms, we developed HybridQ , a highly extensible platform designed to provide a common framework to integrate multiple state-of-the-art techniques to run on a variety of hardware. The philosophy behind its development has been driven by three main pillars: Easy to Use, Easy to Extend, and Use the Best Available Technology. The powerful tools of HybridQ allow users to manipulate, develop, and extend noiseless and noisy circuits for different hardware architectures. HybridQ supports large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) simulations, automatically balancing workload among different processor nodes and enabling the use of multiple backends to maximize parallel efficiency. Everything is then glued together by a simple and expressive language that allows seamless switching from one technique to another as well as from one hardware to the next, without the need to write lengthy translations, thus greatly simplifying the development of new hybrid algorithms and techniques.
Simulation is essential for developing quantum hardware and algorithms. However, simulating quantum circuits on classical hardware is challenging due to the exponential scaling of quantum state space. While factorized tensors can greatly reduce this overhead, tensor network-based simulators are relatively few and often lack crucial functionalities. To address this deficiency, we created TensorLy-Quantum, a Python library for quantum circuit simulation that adopts the PyTorch API. Our library leverages the optimized tensor methods of the existing TensorLy ecosystem to represent, simulate, and manipulate large-scale quantum circuits. Through compact tensor representations and efficient operations, TensorLy-Quantum can scale to hundreds of qubits on a single GPU and thousands of qubits on multiple GPUs. TensorLy-Quantum is open-source and accessible at https://github.com/tensorly/quantum