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arXiv:2503.09776

A Short Scalability Study on the SeQUeNCe Parallel Quantum Network Simulator

Aaron Welch, Mariam Kiran

Published Mar 12, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

As quantum networking continues to grow in importance, its study is of interest to an ever wider community and at an increasing scale. However, the development of its physical infrastructure remains burdensome, and services providing third party access are not enough to meet demand. A variety of simulation frameworks provide a method for testing aspects of such systems on commodity hardware, but are predominantly serial and thus unable to scale to larger networks and/or workloads. One effort to address this was focused on parallelising the SeQUeNCe discrete event simulator, though it has yet to be proven to work well across system architectures or at larger scales. Therein lies the contribution of this work - to more deeply examine its scalability using ORNL Frontier. Our results provide new insight into its scalability behaviour, and we examine its strategy and how it may be able to be improved.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2503.09776

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As quantum networking continues to grow in importance, its study is of interest to an ever wider community and at an increasing scale. However, the development of its physical infrastructure remains burdensome, and services providing third party access are not enough to meet demand. A variety of simulation frameworks provide a method for testing aspects of such systems on commodity hardware, but are predominantly serial and thus unable to scale to larger networks and/or workloads. One effort to address this was focused on parallelising the SeQUeNCe discrete event simulator, though it has yet to be proven to work well across system architectures or at larger scales. Therein lies the contribution of this work - to more deeply examine its scalability using ORNL Frontier. Our results provide new insight into its scalability behaviour, and we examine its strategy and how it may be able to be improved.
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As quantum networking grows in importance, its study is of interest to an ever wider community. Several simulation frameworks allow for testing such systems on commodity hardware, but can be difficult to work with and performance-limited due to their predominantly serial nature. The SeQUeNCe simulator addresses the latter issue, though has not been proven to work well across architectures or larger scales. For the former concern, we introduce BISQIT, a block-diagramme-based framework that models in terms of distinct components and the data flows between them. This provides a simple and modular approach to experimental design that allows for rapid iteration with a library of reusable parts. We demonstrate the flexibility of its design for prototyping and show a path for how to migrate designed experiments to SeQUeNCe for production-scale testing. Our results show the simplicity of the BISQIT model and provide new insight into SeQUeNCe’s scalability behaviour using ORNL’s Frontier.
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With recent advances in the fields of quantum information theory [J. Pablo. Nature 12, 2172 (2021)] and the approach of the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) [J. Preskill. Quantum 2, 79 (2018)] computing era, it is necessary to provide tools for experimentation and prototyping that are able to keep pace with the rapidly progressing field of quantum computing. SeQUeNCe, an open source simulator of quantum network communication, aims to provide scalability and extensibility for the simulation of quantum networks, from the hardware level to the application and protocol level. In order to improve upon the usability of this software, we implement a graphical user interface which maintains the core principles of SeQUeNCe, scalability and extensibility, while enhancing the software's portability and ease of use. We demonstrate the capabilities of the graphical user interface through the construction of the existing Chicago metropolitan quantum network topology.
With the significantly growing investment in quantum communi-cations, quantum key distribution (QKD), as a key application toshare a security key between two remote parties, has been deployedin urban areas and even at a continental scale. To meet the designrequirements of QKD on a quantum communication network, todayresearchers extensively conduct simulation-based evaluations in ad-dition to physical experiments for cost efficiency. A practical QKDsystem must be implemented on a large scale via a network, notjust between a few pairs of users. Existing discrete-event simulatorsoffer models for QKD hardware and protocols based on sequentialexecution. In this work, we investigate the parallel simulation ofQKD networks for scalability enhancement. Our contributions layin the exploration of QKD network characteristics to be leveragedfor parallel simulation. We also develop a parallel simulator forQKD networks with an optimized scheme for network partition.Experimental results show that to simulate a 64-node QKD net-work, our parallel simulator can complete the experiment 9 timesfaster than a sequential simulator running on the same machine.Our linear-regression-based network partition scheme can furtheraccelerate the simulation experiments up to two times than using arandomized network partition scheme.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) has been promoted as a means for secure communications. Although QKD has been widely implemented in many urban fiber networks, the large-scale deployment of QKD remains challenging. Today, researchers extensively conduct simulation-based evaluations for their designs and applications of large-scale QKD networks for cost efficiency. However, the existing discrete-event simulators offer models for QKD hardware and protocols based on sequential event execution, which limits the scale of the experiments. In this work, we explore parallel simulation of QKD networks to address this issue. Our contributions lay in the exploration of QKD network characteristics to be leveraged for parallel simulation as well as the development of a parallel simulation framework for QKD networks. We also investigate three techniques to improve the simulation performance including (1) a ladder queue based event list, (2) memoization for computationally intensive quantum state transformation information, and (3) optimization of the network partition scheme for workload balance. The experimental results show that our parallel simulator is 10 times faster than a sequential simulator when simulating a 128-node QKD network. Our linear-regression-based network partition scheme can further accelerate the simulation experiments up to two times over using a randomized network partition scheme.