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arXiv:2609.04397

Accelerating Atom Simulations with Variable-Block Sparse Matrix Library

Zhanghao Zhouyin, Hong Guo

cond-mat.mtrl-scics.DCquant-phSubmitted Sep 3, 2026• Announced Sep 7, 2026
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Modern atomistic simulations increasingly employ localized orbitals to represent quantum operators, yielding sparse block matrices whose block shapes vary with chemical species and basis choice. Conventional scalar sparse formats store the entries of each block individually, obscuring this local structure and limiting the use of efficient block algorithms. We present VBCSR, a distributed sparse matrix library that preserves variable-size atomic blocks and accelerates the core linear algebra of large-scale atomistic simulations. A unified interface automatically maps scalar, uniform-basis, and multispecies operators to compressed sparse row (CSR), block sparse row (BSR), or variable-block compressed sparse row (VBCSR). Our advanced acceleration method groups blocks of equal shape and dispatches them to optimized dense kernels. In the reported benchmarks, VBCSR outperforms the tested Python-accessible reference implementations for several block-sparse benchmarks. We further demonstrate VBCSR in an InP nanoparticle application containing more than \(10^6\) atoms.

Comments
8 pages, 4 figures

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Modern atomistic simulations increasingly employ localized orbitals to represent quantum operators, yielding sparse block matrices whose block shapes vary with chemical species and basis choice. Conventional scalar sparse formats store the entries of each block individually, obscuring this local structure and limiting the use of efficient block algorithms. We present VBCSR, a distributed sparse matrix library that preserves variable-size atomic blocks and accelerates the core linear algebra of large-scale atomistic simulations. A unified interface automatically maps scalar, uniform-basis, and multispecies operators to compressed sparse row (CSR), block sparse row (BSR), or variable-block compressed sparse row (VBCSR). Our advanced acceleration method groups blocks of equal shape and dispatches them to optimized dense kernels. In the reported benchmarks, VBCSR outperforms the tested Python-accessible reference implementations for several block-sparse benchmarks. We further demonstrate VBCSR in an InP nanoparticle application containing more than (10^6) atoms.
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The core step in quantum simulations is typically matrix vector multiplication $φ= \Hmat ψ$. Executing this step is limited by memory requirement to store the Hamiltonian. We present a memory-scalable, hardware-adaptive matrix-free framework for applying large operators on vectors without materializing the full matrix on a single accelerator. The operator is represented through a block-procedural interface: blocks may be generated, loaded, cached, distributed, or applied directly only when their action is needed. For quantum simulation, it provides the core kernel for quantum operations. An adaptive planner selects block size, cache strategy, GPU grouping, row distribution, and task parallelization from memory and workload estimates. We describe analytic, measured, and learned planning strategies that choose between procedural generation, partial caching, full caching, and row-distributed caching. The method removes the requirement that the full dense matrix fit in the accelerator memory. This shifts large simulations from a fixed memory barrier to a tunable balance between block generation, cache reuse, data movement, parallel scheduling, and numerical accuracy.
While quantum algorithms for solving large scale systems of linear equations offer potentially exponential speedups, their application has largely been confined to sparse matrices. This work extends the scope of these algorithms to a broad class of structured dense matrices arise in potential theory, covariance modeling, and computational physics, namely, hierarchically block separable (HBS) matrices. We develop two distinct methods to make these systems amenable to quantum solvers. The first is a pre-processing approach that transforms the dense matrix into a larger but sparse format. The second is a direct block encoding scheme that recursively constructs the necessary oracles from the HBS structure. We provide a detailed complexity analysis and rigorous error bounds for both methods. Numerical experiments are presented to validate the effectiveness of our approaches.
Electronic structure calculations have been one of the most successful scientific fields in the past 50 years. Density functional theory (DFT) with its nice balance between accuracy and efficiency has now become the standard technique for many materials research. On the other hand, the size of systems that wavefunction-based methods can handle has also been improved thanks to the recent developments in both computation power and more advanced methodologies. However, these methods are still suffering from the curse of dimensionality. The cubic scaling of a typical DFT calculation restricts the handleable system size of DFT to only a few thousand electrons. To this end, tensor-structured techniques provide a route to constructing a reduced-order algorithm and hence are promising to improve the computational efficiency. In this dissertation work, we aim at exploring the applications of the tensor-structured techniques on different aspects of electronic structure calculations. In the first part of this work, we present a tensor-structured algorithm for efficient large-scale DFT calculations by constructing a Tucker tensor basis that is adapted to the Kohn–Sham Hamiltonian and localized in real-space. The proposed approach uses an additive separable approximation to the Kohn–Sham Hamiltonian and an L1 localization technique to generate the 1-D localized functions that constitute the Tucker tensor basis. Numerical results show that the resulting Tucker tensor basis exhibits exponential convergence in the ground-state energy with increasing Tucker rank. Further, the proposed tensor-structured algorithm demonstrated sub-quadratic scaling with system-size for both systems with and without a gap, and involving many thousands of atoms. This reduced-order scaling has also resulted in the proposed approach outperforming plane-wave DFT implementation for systems beyond 2000 electrons. In the second part of this work, we present an acceleration scheme for the proposed tensor-structured algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, the discrete Kohn-Sham problem is solved using the Chebyshev filtering subspace iteration method that relies on matrix-matrix multiplications of a sparse symmetric Hamiltonian matrix and a dense wavefunction matrix, expressed in the localized Tucker tensor basis. These matrix-matrix multiplication operations, which constitute the most computationally intensive step of the solution procedure, are GPU accelerated providing ~8-fold GPU-CPU speedup for these operations on the largest systems studied. The computational performance of the GPU accelerated code is presented using benchmark studies on aluminum nano-particles and silicon quantum dots with system sizes ranging up to ~7,000 atoms. Finally, we present a computation kernel using tensor-structured techniques to evaluate the one-electron and two-electron integrals, which are the central quantities to construct the Hamiltonian matrix of a full configuration interaction (FCI) calculation, for any molecular orbitals projected on a tensor-structured finite-element mesh. The proposed computation kernel is used to compute the integrals using Hartree-Fock molecular orbitals, which is subsequently used to perform an FCI calculation. In our numerical study, the FCI energy using integrals from the proposed computation kernel is confirmed to be consistent with a standard FCI calculation using the same Hartree-Fock orbitals. The proposed computation kernel provides a useful tool to investigate the behavior of Kohn-Sham orbitals as a basis for FCI calculations in the future, which could be a route to construct a reduced-order basis for an FCI calculation to reduce the computational cost and enable FCI calculation for the previously computationally inaccessible systems.
Efficient manipulation of Pauli-algebraic objects is a key bottleneck in the classical emulation and benchmarking of quantum algorithms for chemistry and many-body physics. This bottleneck appears in Hamiltonian construction, variational ansatz preparation, expectation-value and gradient evaluation, and real-time propagation, all of which require repeated Pauli-algebra operations. Here, we present a high-performance Pauli-algebra framework tailored to quantum many-body and quantum-chemical simulations. The framework combines compact binary symplectic encoding, canonical coefficient reduction, and grouped sparse operator representations that exploit shared bit-flip patterns among Pauli strings. The resulting Julia/C\texttt{++} implementation accelerates Pauli multiplication, Hamiltonian construction, and operator--state multiplication in sparse and symmetry-adapted many-electron spaces. Benchmarks demonstrate efficient Hamiltonian construction, large-active-space VQE and ADAPT-VQE calculations, and real-time variational dynamics on modern multicore CPU and GPU architectures. These results show that structure-aware Pauli-algebra engines provide a scalable classical backend for developing and benchmarking quantum algorithms in quantum chemistry and many-body simulation.
In the current era of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computing, efficient digital simulation of quantum systems holds significant importance for quantum algorithm development, verification and validation. However, analysis of sparsity within these simulations remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a novel observation regarding the prevalent sparsity patterns inherent in quantum circuits. We introduce DiaQ, a new sparse matrix format tailored to exploit this quantum-specific sparsity, thereby enhancing simulation performance. Our contribution extends to the development of libdiaq, a numerical library implemented in C++ with OpenMP for multi-core acceleration and SIMD vectorization, featuring essential mathematical kernels for digital quantum simulations. Furthermore, we integrate DiaQ with SV-Sim, a state vector simulator, yielding substantial performance improvements across various quantum circuits (e.g., ~26.67% for GHZ-28 and ~32.72% for QFT-29 with multi-core parallelization and SIMD vectorization on Frontier). Evaluations conducted on benchmarks from SupermarQ and QASMBench demonstrate that DiaQ represents a significant step towards achieving highly efficient quantum simulations.