A state vector-based quantum circuit simulation can provide accurate results for the development and validation of quantum computing algorithms, without being affected by noise interference. However, existing quantum circuit simulators have consistently underperformed due to inadequate integration with quantum circuits and high-performance computing architectures. To tackle the challenges in quantum computing, we propose QueenV2, which builds upon the design principles of Queen and elevates performance to a new level. Experimental results on the NVIDIA RTX-4090 demonstrate that QueenV2 achieves up to a 40x improvement in gate performance and a 5x improvement in circuit performance compared to hyQuas. Furthermore, QueenV2 realizes a 137x speedup in gate benchmarks and a 14x speedup in circuit performance relative to NVIDIA cuQuantum, enabled by gate fusion via the IBM Qiskit toolkit. By eliminating reliance on third-party libraries, QueenV2 is positioned to significantly accelerate quantum circuit simulation, thus promoting the development of innovative accelerators and quantum algorithms.
A state vector-based quantum circuit simulation can provide accurate results for the development and validation of quantum computing algorithms, without being affected by noise interference. However, existing quantum circuit simulators have consistently underperformed due to inadequate integration with quantum circuits and high-performance computing architectures. To tackle the challenges in quantum computing, we propose QueenV2, which builds upon the design principles of Queen and elevates performance to a new level. Experimental results on the NVIDIA RTX-4090 demonstrate that QueenV2 achieves up to a 40x improvement in gate performance and a 5x improvement in circuit performance compared to hyQuas. Furthermore, QueenV2 realizes a 137x speedup in gate benchmarks and a 14x speedup in circuit performance relative to NVIDIA cuQuantum, enabled by gate fusion via the IBM Qiskit toolkit. By eliminating reliance on third-party libraries, QueenV2 is positioned to significantly accelerate quantum circuit simulation, thus promoting the development of innovative accelerators and quantum algorithms.
The state vector-based simulation offers a convenient approach to developing and validating quantum algorithms with noise-free results. However, limited by the absence of cache-aware implementations and unpolished circuit optimizations, the past simulators were severely constrained in performance, leading to stagnation in quantum computing. In this paper, we present an innovative quantum circuit simulation toolkit comprising gate optimization and simulation modules to address these performance challenges. For the performance, scalability, and comprehensive evaluation, we conduct a series of particular circuit benchmarks and strong scaling tests on a DGX-A100 workstation and achieve averaging 9 times speedup compared to state-of-the-art simulators, including QuEST, IBM-Aer, and NVIDIA-cuQuantum. Moreover, the critical performance metric FLOPS increases by up to a factor of 8-fold, and arithmetic intensity experiences a remarkable 96x enhancement. We believe the proposed toolkit paves the way for faster quantum circuit simulations, thereby facilitating the development of novel quantum algorithms.
Quantum circuit simulation is crucial for the development of quantum algorithms, particularly given the high cost and noise limitations of physical quantum hardware. While full-state quantum circuit simulation is commonly employed for prototyping and debugging, it poses challenges because of the exponential increase in simulation time for large quantum systems. In this work, we propose an extensible framework designed to enhance simulation performance by optimizing both data locality and computational efficiency, thereby addressing these challenges. This framework is seamlessly integrated with an optimizer that restructures quantum circuits and a simulator that adjusts execution strategies for various quantum operations. For the newly developed components, merge booster and diagonal detector, the underlying algorithms are inspired by the principles of quantum entanglement and gate fusion, as well as by the limitations identified in existing third-party simulation libraries. The experiments were conducted on eight DGX-H100 workstations, each equipped with eight NVIDIA H100 GPUs, employing both gate-level and circuit-level benchmarks. The results indicate a speedup of up to 160 times for circuit-level benchmarks and an acceleration of up to 34 times for diagonal-heavy gate-level benchmarks compared to existing simulators. The proposed methodologies are anticipated to deliver more robust and faster quantum circuit simulations, thereby fostering the advancement of novel quantum algorithms.
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.
Quantum computer simulators are crucial for the development of quantum computing. In this work, we investigate the suitability and performance impact of GPU and multi-GPU systems on a widely used simulation tool - the state vector simulator Qiskit Aer. In particular, we evaluate the performance of both Qiskit's default Nvidia Thrust backend and the recent Nvidia cuQuantum backend on Nvidia A100 GPUs. We provide a benchmark suite of representative quantum applications for characterization. For simulations with a large number of qubits, the two GPU backends can provide up to 14x speedup over the CPU backend, with Nvidia cuQuantum providing further 1.5-3x speedup over the default Thrust backend. Our evaluation on a single GPU identifies the most important functions in Nvidia Thrust and cuQuantum for different quantum applications and their compute and memory bottlenecks. We also evaluate the gate fusion and cache-blocking optimizations on different quantum applications. Finally, we evaluate large-number qubit quantum applications on multi-GPU and identify data movement between host and GPU as the limiting factor for the performance.
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.
Quantum computer simulators are crucial for the development of quantum computing. This work investigates GPU and multi-GPU systems' suitability and performance impact on a widely used simulation tool – the state vector simulator Qiskit Aer. In particular, we evaluate the performance of both Qiskit's default Nvidia Thrust backend and the recent Nvidia cuQuantum backend on Nvidia A100 GPUs. We provide a benchmark suite of representative quantum applications for characterization. For simulations with a large number of qubits, the two GPU backends can provide up to 14× speedup over the CPU backend, with Nvidia cuQuantum providing a further 1.5–3× speedup over the default Thrust backend. Our evaluation on a single GPU identifies the most important functions in Nvidia Thrust and cuQuantum for different quantum applications and their compute and memory bottlenecks. We also evaluate the gate fusion and cache-blocking optimizations on different quantum applications. Finally, we evaluate large-number qubit quantum applications on multi-GPU and identify data movement between host and GPU as the limiting factor for the performance.