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arXiv:2205.10091 · Quantum

TensorCircuit: a Quantum Software Framework for the NISQ Era

Shi‐Xin Zhang, Jonathan Allcock, Zhou‐Quan Wan, Shuo Liu, Jiace Sun, Hao Yu, Xing-Han Yang, Jiezhong Qiu, Zhaofeng Ye, Yuqin Chen, Chee‐Kong Lee, Yi-Cong Zheng, Shao-Kai Jian, Hong Yao, Chang‐Yu Hsieh, Shengyu Zhang

Published Feb 2, 2023• 126 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

TensorCircuit is an open source quantum circuit simulator based on tensor network contraction, designed for speed, flexibility and code efficiency. Written purely in Python, and built on top of industry-standard machine learning frameworks, TensorCircuit supports automatic differentiation, just-in-time compilation, vectorized parallelism and hardware acceleration. These features allow TensorCircuit to simulate larger and more complex quantum circuits than existing simulators, and are especially suited to variational algorithms based on parameterized quantum circuits. TensorCircuit enables orders of magnitude speedup for various quantum simulation tasks compared to other common quantum software, and can simulate up to 600 qubits with moderate circuit depth and low-dimensional connectivity. With its time and space efficiency, flexible and extensible architecture and compact, user-friendly API, TensorCircuit has been built to facilitate the design, simulation and analysis of quantum algorithms in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era.

DOI
10.22331/q-2023-02-02-912

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TensorCircuit is an open source quantum circuit simulator based on tensor network contraction, designed for speed, flexibility and code efficiency. Written purely in Python, and built on top of industry-standard machine learning frameworks, TensorCircuit supports automatic differentiation, just-in-time compilation, vectorized parallelism and hardware acceleration. These features allow TensorCircuit to simulate larger and more complex quantum circuits than existing simulators, and are especially suited to variational algorithms based on parameterized quantum circuits. TensorCircuit enables orders of magnitude speedup for various quantum simulation tasks compared to other common quantum software, and can simulate up to 600 qubits with moderate circuit depth and low-dimensional connectivity. With its time and space efficiency, flexible and extensible architecture and compact, user-friendly API, TensorCircuit has been built to facilitate the design, simulation and analysis of quantum algorithms in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era.
We present TensorCircuit-NG, a next-generation quantum software platform designed to bridge the gap between quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing. Moving beyond the scope of traditional circuit simulators, TensorCircuit-NG establishes a unified, tensor-native programming paradigm where quantum circuits, tensor networks, and neural networks fuse into a single, end-to-end differentiable computational graph. Built upon industry-standard machine learning backends (JAX, TensorFlow, PyTorch), the framework introduces comprehensive capabilities for approximate circuit simulation, analog dynamics, fermion Gaussian states, qudit systems, and scalable noise modeling. To tackle the exponential complexity of deep quantum circuits, TensorCircuit-NG implements advanced distributed computing strategies, including automated data parallelism and model-parallel tensor network slicing. We validate these capabilities on GPU clusters, demonstrating a near-linear speedup in distributed variational quantum algorithms. TensorCircuit-NG enables flagship applications, including end-to-end QML for CIFAR-100 computer vision, efficient pipelines from quantum states to neural networks via classical shadows, and differentiable optimization of tensor network states for many-body physics.
We introduce a new open-source software library Jet , which uses task-based parallelism to obtain speed-ups in classical tensor-network simulations of quantum circuits. These speed-ups result from i) the increased parallelism introduced by mapping the tensor-network simulation to a task-based framework, ii) a novel method of reusing shared work between tensor-network contraction tasks, and iii) the concurrent contraction of tensor networks on all available hardware. We demonstrate the advantages of our method by benchmarking our code on several Sycamore-53 and Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) supremacy circuits against other simulators. We also provide and compare theoretical performance estimates for tensor-network simulations of Sycamore-53 and GBS supremacy circuits for the first time.
TeD-Q is an open-source software framework for quantum machine learning, variational quantum algorithm (VQA), and simulation of quantum computing. It seamlessly integrates classical machine learning libraries with quantum simulators, giving users the ability to leverage the power of classical machine learning while training quantum machine learning models. TeD-Q supports auto-differentiation that provides backpropagation, parameters shift, and finite difference methods to obtain gradients. With tensor contraction, simulation of quantum circuits with large number of qubits is possible. TeD-Q also provides a graphical mode in which the quantum circuit and the training progress can be visualized in real-time.
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
We introduce MindSpore Quantum, a pioneering hybrid quantum-classical framework with a primary focus on the design and implementation of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) algorithms. Leveraging the robust support of MindSpore, an advanced open-source deep learning training/inference framework, MindSpore Quantum exhibits exceptional efficiency in the design and training of variational quantum algorithms on both CPU and GPU platforms, delivering remarkable performance. Furthermore, this framework places a strong emphasis on enhancing the operational efficiency of quantum algorithms when executed on real quantum hardware. This encompasses the development of algorithms for quantum circuit compilation and qubit mapping, crucial components for achieving optimal performance on quantum processors. In addition to the core framework, we introduce QuPack, a meticulously crafted quantum computing acceleration engine. QuPack significantly accelerates the simulation speed of MindSpore Quantum, particularly in variational quantum eigensolver (VQE), quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), and tensor network simulations, providing astonishing speed. This combination of cutting-edge technologies empowers researchers and practitioners to explore the frontiers of quantum computing with unprecedented efficiency and performance.
Circuit design for quantum machine learning remains a formidable challenge. Inspired by the applications of tensor networks across different fields and their novel presence in the classical machine learning context, one proposed method to design variational circuits is to base the circuit architecture on tensor networks. Here, we comprehensively describe tensor-network quantum circuits and how to implement them in simulations. This includes leveraging circuit cutting, a technique used to evaluate circuits with more qubits than those available on current quantum devices. We then illustrate the computational requirements and possible applications by simulating various tensor-network quantum circuits with PennyLane, an open-source python library for differential programming of quantum computers. Finally, we demonstrate how to apply these circuits to increasingly complex image processing tasks, completing this overview of a flexible method to design circuits that can be applied to industrially-relevant machine learning tasks.