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arXiv:2303.10788 · Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture/Proceedings

Clifford-based Circuit Cutting for Quantum Simulation

Kaitlin N. Smith, Michael A. Perlin, Pranav Gokhale, Paige Frederick, David Owusu-Antwi, Richard Rines, Victory Omole, Frederic T. Chong

Published Jun 16, 2023• 23 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum computing has potential to provide exponential speedups over classical computing for many important applications. However, today's quantum computers are in their early stages, and hardware quality issues hinder the scale of program execution. Benchmarking and simulation of quantum circuits on classical computers is therefore essential to advance the understanding of how quantum computers and programs operate, enabling both algorithm discovery that leads to high-impact quantum computation and engineering improvements that deliver to more powerful quantum systems. Unfortunately, the nature of quantum information causes simulation complexity to scale exponentially with problem size.

DOI
10.1145/3579371.3589352

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Quantum computing has potential to provide exponential speedups over classical computing for many important applications. However, today's quantum computers are in their early stages, and hardware quality issues hinder the scale of program execution. Benchmarking and simulation of quantum circuits on classical computers is therefore essential to advance the understanding of how quantum computers and programs operate, enabling both algorithm discovery that leads to high-impact quantum computation and engineering improvements that deliver to more powerful quantum systems. Unfortunately, the nature of quantum information causes simulation complexity to scale exponentially with problem size.
Quantum computing (QC) is a new paradigm offering the potential of exponential speedups over classical computing for certain computational problems. Each additional qubit doubles the size of the computational state space available to a QC algorithm. This exponential scaling underlies QC’s power, but today’s Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices face significant engineering challenges in scalability. The set of quantum circuits that can be reliably run on NISQ devices is limited by their noisy operations and low qubit counts. This paper introduces CutQC, a scalable hybrid computing approach that combines classical computers and quantum computers to enable evaluation of quantum circuits that cannot be run on classical or quantum computers alone. CutQC cuts large quantum circuits into smaller subcircuits, allowing them to be executed on smaller quantum devices. Classical postprocessing can then reconstruct the output of the original circuit. This approach offers significant runtime speedup compared with the only viable current alternative—purely classical simulations—and demonstrates evaluation of quantum circuits that are larger than the limit of QC or classical simulation. Furthermore, in real-system runs, CutQC achieves much higher quantum circuit evaluation fidelity using small prototype quantum computers than the state-of-the-art large NISQ devices achieve. Overall, this hybrid approach allows users to leverage classical and quantum computing resources to evaluate quantum programs far beyond the reach of either one alone.
Circuit cutting allows quantum circuits larger than the available hardware to be executed. Cutting techniques split circuits into smaller subcircuits, run them on the hardware, and recombine results through classical post-processing. Circuit cutting techniques have been extensively researched over the last five years and it been adopted by major quantum hardware vendors as part of their scaling roadmaps. We examine whether current circuit cutting techniques are practical for orchestrating executions on fault-tolerant quantum computers. We conduct a resource estimation-based benchmarking of important quantum applications and different types of circuit cutting techniques. Our applications include practically relevant algorithms, such as Hamiltonian simulation, kernels such as quantum Fourier transform and more. To cut these applications, we use IBM's Qiskit cutting tool. We estimate resources for subcircuits using Microsoft's Azure Quantum Resource Estimator and develop models to determine the qubit, quantum and classical runtime needs of circuit cutting. We demonstrate that while circuit cutting works for small-scale systems, the exponential growth of the quantum runtime and the classical post-processing overhead as the qubit count increases renders it impractical for larger quantum systems with current implementation strategies. As we transition from noisy quantum hardware to fault-tolerance, our work provides important guidance for the design of quantum software and runtime systems.
Circuit cutting allows quantum circuits larger than the available hardware to be executed. Cutting techniques split circuits into smaller subcircuits, run them on the hardware, and recombine results through classical post-processing. Circuit cutting techniques have been extensively researched over the last five years and it been adopted by quantum companies, like IBM, as part of their scaling roadmap. We examine whether current circuit cutting techniques are practical for orchestrating executions on fault-tolerant quantum computers. We conduct a resource estimation-based benchmarking of important quantum applications and different types of circuit cutting techniques. Our applications include practically relevant algorithms such as Hamiltonian simulation, kernels such as quantum Fourier transform and more. To cut these applications, we use IBM's Qiskit cutting tool. We estimate resources for subcircuits using Microsoft's Azure Quantum Resource Estimator and develop models to determine qubit counts and the quantum and classical runtime needs of circuit cutting. We demonstrate that while circuit cutting works for small-scale systems, the exponential growth of the quantum excution runtime and the classical post-processing overhead as the qubit count increases renders it impractical for larger quantum systems with current implementation strategies. As we transition from noisy quantum hardware to fault-tolerance, our work provides useful guidance for the design of quantum software and runtime systems.
Quantum computing (QC) offers a new computing paradigm that has the potential to provide significant speedups over classical computing. Each additional qubit doubles the size of the computational state space available to a quantum algorithm. Such exponentially expanding reach underlies QC's power, but at the same time puts demanding requirements on the quantum processing units (QPU) hardware. On the other hand, purely classical simulations of quantum circuits on either central processing unit (CPU) or graphics processing unit (GPU) scale poorly as they quickly become bottlenecked by runtime and memory. This paper introduces CutQC, a scalable hybrid computing approach that distributes a large quantum circuit onto quantum (QPU) and classical platforms (CPU or GPU) for co-processing. CutQC demonstrates evaluation of quantum circuits that are larger than the limit of QPU or classical simulation, and achieves much higher quantum circuit evaluation fidelity than the large NISQ devices achieve in real-system runs.
Quantum computing has the potential to accelerate various fields by solving specific problems significantly faster than classical computers. Solving more complex problems generally requires a larger number of qubits. However, current quantum devices are constrained by limited qubit counts and environmental noise. Quantum circuit cutting bridges the gap between the theoretical requirements of large quantum circuits and the practical limitations of current quantum hardware by decomposing large circuits into smaller subcircuits. Tang et al. introduced CutQC, a framework that reduces the number of generated subcircuits and reconstructs the complete quantum state with limited memory consumption. Despite these advances, CutQC faces performance bottlenecks in classical postprocessing, leading to long execution times. To address this limitation, we propose QCutSim, an efficient simulation-based framework guided by insights from the postprocessing stage. It improves performance through optimized simulation and reconstruction strategies, along with computational optimizations such as vectorization and parallelization. QCutSim demonstrates that even consumer-grade systems can efficiently simulate 100-qubit circuits and achieves a speedup of up to 5.1x compared to prior work on the same hardware. In the worst-case scenario of reconstructing dense solution circuits, QCutSim achieves a speedup of 6 to 8 orders of magnitude.
Current quantum computers suffer from a limited number of qubits and high error rates, limiting practical applicability. Different techniques exist to mitigate these effects and run larger algorithms. In this work, we analyze one of these techniques called quantum circuit cutting. With circuit cutting, a quantum circuit is decomposed into smaller sub-circuits, each of which can be run on smaller quantum hardware. We compare the performance of quantum circuit cutting with different cutting strategies, and then apply circuit cutting to a QAOA algorithm. Using simulations, we first show that Randomized Clifford measurements outperform both Pauli and random unitary measurements. Second, we show that circuit cutting has trouble providing correct answers in noisy settings, especially as the number of circuits increases.