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arXiv:2604.14435

Distributed Variational Quantum Linear Solver

Chao Lu, Pooja Rao, Muralikrishnan Gopalakrishnan Meena, Kalyana Chakaravarthi Gottiparthi

quant-phcs.DCSubmitted Apr 15, 2026• Announced Apr 17, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Aug 31, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Apr 15, 2026v2 · Aug 31, 2026
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Abstract

The Variational Quantum Linear Solver (VQLS), a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for solving linear systems, faces a practical scalability bottleneck: the Linear Combination of Unitaries (LCU) decomposition requires $O(L^2)$ circuit evaluations per optimizer iteration, where $L$ can grow to $4^n$ in the worst case for an $n$-qubit system. We address this computational bottleneck through two complementary strategies. First, we present a distributed VQLS (D-VQLS) framework (https://code.ornl.gov/olcf-qcfd/DVQLS.git), built on NVIDIA CUDA-Q, that enables asynchronous, scalable distribution of the $O(L^2)$ cost evaluations. Second, a fast Walsh--Hadamard transform (FWHT)-based Pauli decomposition with coefficient-amplitude pruning threshold $τ=0.01$ curbs LCU growth for the structured Toeplitz family, reducing $L$ from $O(2^n)$ to 64 for $n>6$ and compressing the circuit complexity per optimizer iteration from $O(n4^n)$ to $O(n)$. We derive the exact top-$L$ Frobenius error and connect it to worst-case solution error. For a 10-qubit tridiagonal Toeplitz system, the $L=64$ pruning yields a $256\times$ reduction---from 23 million to 90k circuits per optimizer iteration. The D-VQLS framework is validated on the NERSC Perlmutter supercomputer using multi-node, multi-GPU ideal state-vector simulations, achieving over $99.99\%$ fidelity against classical solutions on tridiagonal Toeplitz and Hele--Shaw flow benchmarks, with near-ideal strong scaling up to 24 GPUs and $95.3\%$ weak scaling efficiency at 96 GPUs processing more than 360k circuits per optimizer iteration (from larger-$L$ pruning) for the 10-qubit system. Systematic profiling identifies the optimal resource allocation for distributed quantum circuit workloads, yielding a $2.52\times$ speedup for the configurations studied.

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The Variational Quantum Linear Solver (VQLS), a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for solving linear systems, faces a practical scalability bottleneck: the Linear Combination of Unitaries (LCU) decomposition requires O(L2)O(L^2)O(L2) circuit evaluations per optimizer iteration, where LLL can grow to 4n4^n4n in the worst case for an nnn-qubit system. We address this computational bottleneck through two complementary strategies. First, we present a distributed VQLS (D-VQLS) framework (https://code.ornl.gov/olcf-qcfd/DVQLS.git), built on NVIDIA CUDA-Q, that enables asynchronous, scalable distribution of the O(L2)O(L^2)O(L2) cost evaluations. Second, a fast Walsh--Hadamard transform (FWHT)-based Pauli decomposition with coefficient-amplitude pruning threshold τ=0.01τ=0.01τ=0.01 curbs LCU growth for the structured Toeplitz family, reducing LLL from O(2n)O(2^n)O(2n) to 64 for n>6n>6n>6 and compressing the circuit complexity per optimizer iteration from O(n4n)O(n4^n)O(n4n) to O(n)O(n)O(n). We derive the exact top-LLL Frobenius error and connect it to worst-case solution error. For a 10-qubit tridiagonal Toeplitz system, the L=64L=64L=64 pruning yields a 256×256\times256× reduction---from 23 million to 90k circuits per optimizer iteration.
The D-VQLS framework is validated on the NERSC Perlmutter supercomputer using multi-node, multi-GPU ideal state-vector simulations, achieving over 99.99%99.99\%99.99% fidelity against classical solutions on tridiagonal Toeplitz and Hele--Shaw flow benchmarks, with near-ideal strong scaling up to 24 GPUs and 95.3%95.3\%95.3% weak scaling efficiency at 96 GPUs processing more than 360k circuits per optimizer iteration (from larger-LLL pruning) for the 10-qubit system. Systematic profiling identifies the optimal resource allocation for distributed quantum circuit workloads, yielding a 2.52×2.52\times2.52× speedup for the configurations studied.
Fluid dynamics workloads are dominated by repeated solves of large, structured linear systems, motivating the search for quantum acceleration. The Variational Quantum Linear Solver (VQLS) is a leading near-term candidate, but practical deployment on hybrid quantum--high--performance computing (HPC) systems faces three persistent challenges: (i) the linear-combination-of-unitaries (LCU) encoding of the system matrix explodes in memory and runtime as the problem size grows, (ii) ansatz selection is largely empirical, with no clear link between standard circuit metrics and solver convergence, and (iii) end-to-end VQLS pipelines have rarely been exercised on production HPC hardware at non-trivial qubit counts. This work addresses these challenges through three contributions. First, we benchmark four matrix-encoding strategies---naive LCU, PennyLane-integrated, Fast Walsh--Hadamard Transform (FWHT)-based parallel Pauli decomposition, and an singular value decomposition (SVD)-based two-term LCU---and show that the FWHT approach reduces peak memory by up to 1298×1298\times1298× on an 11×1111\times 1111×11 Hele--Shaw grid, while the SVD-based coherent VQLS delivers over 10,000×10{,}000\times10,000× per-iteration speedup over standard Pauli-based VQLS at 8 qubits. Second, we evaluate 11 ansatz families with gradient-free and gradient-based optimizers on canonical Hele--Shaw flow, and find that expressibility and entanglement metrics correlate only weakly with VQLS convergence, motivating problem-aware ansatz design. Third, we deploy the full workflow on the OLCF Frontier supercomputer and successfully simulate a 15-qubit tridiagonal Toeplitz system on a single node. Together, these results establish a practical baseline for VQLS in hybrid quantum--HPC computation fluid dynamic (CFD) workflows and identify the remaining bottlenecks for larger problems.
Different hybrid quantum-classical algorithms have recently been developed as a near-term way to solve linear systems of equations on quantum devices. However, the focus has so far been mostly on the methods, rather than the problems that they need to tackle. In fact, these algorithms have been run on real hardware only for problems in quantum physics, such as Hamiltonians of a few qubits systems. These problems are particularly favorable for quantum hardware, since their matrices are the sum of just a few unitary terms and since only shallow quantum circuits are required to estimate the cost function. However, for many interesting problems in linear algebra, it appears far less trivial to find an efficient decomposition and to trade it off with the depth of the cost quantum circuits. A first simple yet interesting instance to consider are tridiagonal systems of equations. These arise, for instance, in the discretization of one-dimensional finite element analyses. This work presents a method to solve a class of tridiagonal systems of equations with the variational quantum linear solver (VQLS), a recently proposed variational hybrid algorithm for solving linear systems. In particular, we present a new decomposition for this class of matrices based on both Pauli strings and multi--qubit gates, resulting in less terms than those obtained by just using Pauli gates. Based on this decomposition, we discuss the tradeoff between the number of terms and the near-term implementability of the quantum circuits. Furthermore, we present the first simulated and real-hardware results obtained by solving tridiagonal linear systems with VQLS, using the decomposition proposed.
We develop a novel approach for efficiently applying the variational quantum linear solver (VQLS) in the context of structured sparse matri-ces. Such matrices frequently arise during numerical solution of partial differential equations which are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Conventionally, Pauli basis is used for the linear combination of uni-taries (LCU) decomposition of the underlying matrix to facilitate evaluation of the global/local VQLS cost functions. However, the number of LCU terms can scale quadratically with respect to the matrix sizeNNNin the worst case. Using the heat equation as an example, we show that by using an alternate basis one can better exploit the sparsity and underlying structure of matrix leading to number of tensor product terms which scale only logarithmically with respect to the matrix size. Given this new basis is comprised of non-unitary operators, we employ the concept of unitary completion to design efficient quantum circuits for computing the global/local VQLS cost functions. With one additionalnnn- Toffoli gate (where,n=log⁡Nn= \log Nn=logN) and one ancilla qubit, our method could provide an exponential time advantage over conventionally used Pauli basis for some applications. We perform a rigorous analysis of our approach and compare with other related concepts in literature including unitary dilation and Bell basis measurement, and discuss its pros/cons.
Voltage source converters (VSCs) play a critical role in modern power systems, where their simulation requires solving linear system problems and remains computationally expensive. Quantum linear system solvers, particularly the variational quantum linear solver (VQLS) tailored for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, offer a competitive paradigm with the potential for developing linear solvers with logarithmically scaled computational complexity. We propose Acc-VQLS, a domain-specific quantum algorithm and circuit co-optimization method that accelerates traditional VQLS for VSC simulation. We adopt constant vector-based variational quantum circuits for fast convergence with efficient initial state preparation and employ multi-core processing to parallelize the cost function evaluation and gradient computation. To demonstrate the potential applicability of Acc-VQLS in VSC operating scenarios, we employ the commonly used fault behavior model for VQLS-based VSC simulation. Quantitative experimental evaluations and comparisons across the tested benchmarks show that the proposed Acc-VQLS reduces iterations required for cost function convergence by an average of 82.5%, and our multi-core parallel computing strategy achieves a 53.9 × speedup on the AMD EPYC 9554 CPU. By incorporating a short-circuit fault in the VSC simulation, the proposed Acc-VQLS with error compensation achieves less than 10 − 9 in both the mean absolute error and the root mean square error.
We present a variational quantum linear solver (VQLS) for the Poisson equation built on an exact block encoding of the discrete Laplacian, and demonstrate its performance on physically motivated benchmarks. Unlike LCU-based VQLS where the number of distinct circuits required per cost-function evaluation is O(L2)\mathcal{O}(L^2)O(L2), where LLL is the number of terms in the LCU decomposition of the discrete Laplacian operator, this approach requires only a single circuit for cost evaluation. We further empirically demonstrate that the choice of classical optimizer materially affects where the variational optimization ceases to make progress. The solver is benchmarked on three problems: a Poisson equation with sinusoidal forcing and a steady-state heat conduction problem with a localized Gaussian source, both with Dirichlet boundaries, and the pressure-Poisson equation of a two-dimensional lid-driven cavity flow, in which the solver is invoked once per time step under Neumann boundary conditions.
Quantum computing (QC) represents an emerging frontier with significant potential for transformative advancements in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This potential has been explicitly recognized by the CFD Vision 2030 report, emphasizing the strategic importance of exploring QC for future breakthroughs. Among quantum algorithms relevant to CFD, the Variational Quantum Linear Solver (VQLS) is particularly promising due to its suitability for solving linear and Hamiltonian-based problems, characteristic of fundamental CFD equations such as the pressure-Poisson equation. However, the practical implementation of VQLS for large-scale CFD problems faces critical scalability challenges, most notably the exponential increase in the number of quantum circuit evaluations and the barren plateau phenomenon, which severely hampers trainability and algorithm convergence. In this study, two novel strategies are introduced to address these challenges. First, we utilize a block encoding technique based on efficient oracles, thereby significantly reducing quantum circuit complexity and qubit overhead while accessing system matrix. Second, we incorporate a quantum-inspired evolutionary optimization (QIEO) approach, demonstrating enhanced training efficiency and effectively mitigating the barren plateau issue. These improvements are integrated within a Hybrid Quantum-Classical Method (HQCM) linear solver framework and demonstrated through solving a 2D steady-state heat equation, representative of the pressure-Poisson equations common in incompressible CFD simulations. The proposed methodologies yield promising results, showcasing improved circuit efficiency, enhanced stability during optimization, and accurate numerical solutions. This work lays a foundational step toward realizing practical, scalable quantum-assisted CFD solvers and sets clear pathways for future research aimed at further algorithmic and architectural enhancements.