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arXiv:2308.03399

Efficient techniques to GPU Accelerations of Multi-Shot Quantum Computing Simulations

Jun Doi, Hiroshi Horii, Christopher J. Wood

Published Aug 7, 2023• 4 citations

Abstract

Quantum computers are becoming practical for computing numerous applications. However, simulating quantum computing on classical computers is still demanding yet useful because current quantum computers are limited because of computer resources, hardware limits, instability, and noises. Improving quantum computing simulation performance in classical computers will contribute to the development of quantum computers and their algorithms. Quantum computing simulations on classical computers require long performance times, especially for quantum circuits with a large number of qubits or when simulating a large number of shots for noise simulations or circuits with intermediate measures. Graphical processing units (GPU) are suitable to accelerate quantum computer simulations by exploiting their computational power and high bandwidth memory and they have a large advantage in simulating relatively larger qubits circuits. However, GPUs are inefficient at simulating multi-shots runs with noises because the randomness prevents highly parallelization. In addition, GPUs have a disadvantage in simulating circuits with a small number of qubits because of the large overheads in GPU kernel execution. In this paper, we introduce optimization techniques for multi-shot simulations on GPUs. We gather multiple shots of simulations into a single GPU kernel execution to reduce overheads by scheduling randomness caused by noises. In addition, we introduce shot-branching that reduces calculations and memory usage for multi-shot simulations. By using these techniques, we speed up x10 from previous implementations.

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2308.03399

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Simulation of quantum computers using classical computers is a hard problem with high memory and computational requirements. Parallelization can alleviate this problem, allowing the simulation of more qubits at the same time or the same number of qubits to be simulated in less time. A promising approach is to exploit the high performance computing capabilities provided by the latest graphical processing units. In this paper we present a parallel implementation of the QC-lib quantum computer simulator on the GPU using the CUDA programming model. The proposed scheme for partitioning the terms that describe the state of a quantum register takes advantage of the specific characteristics of the CUDA memory spaces and allows for an efficient parallelization of the general singe qubit operator. Experimental results indicate that very good speed-ups can be obtained in contrast with the sequential implementation.

Exponential increase and global access to read/write memory states in quantum computing (QC) simulation limit both the number of qubits and quantum transformations which can be currently simulated. Although QC simulation is parallel by nature, spatial and temporal complexity are major performance hazards, making this a nontrivial application for high performance computing. A new methodology employing reduction and decomposition optimizations has shown relevant results, but its GPU implementation could be further improved. In this work, we develop a new kernel for in situ GPU simulation that better explores its resources without requiring further hardware. Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms are simulated up to 25 and 21 qubits respectively and compared to our previous version, to [Formula: see text] simulator and to ProjectQ framework, showing better results with relative speedups up to 4.38×, 3357.76× and 333× respectively.