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IEEE Latin American Symposium on Circuits and Systems (LASCAS)

Efficient emulation of quantum circuits on classical hardware

Calebe Micael de Oliveira Conceicao, Ricardo A. L. Reis

Published Feb 1, 2015• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Current approaches for emulation of quantum algorithms on classical parallel hardware like FPGA suffer with three main issues: exponential usage of logic elements, synthesis takes exponential time and difficulty of implementation. In this paper we propose a processor architecture capable of efficiently emulate quantum circuits, reducing the mishaps of previous similar proposals. We compare our results to previous works with respect to a common benchmark and validate the architecture using FPGA. Our approach has better scalability in logic cell usage, a better management of the need of re-synthesis and easier implementation.

DOI
10.1109/lascas.2015.7250404

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Current approaches for emulation of quantum algorithms on classical parallel hardware like FPGA suffer with three main issues: exponential usage of logic elements, synthesis takes exponential time and difficulty of implementation. In this paper we propose a processor architecture capable of efficiently emulate quantum circuits, reducing the mishaps of previous similar proposals. We compare our results to previous works with respect to a common benchmark and validate the architecture using FPGA. Our approach has better scalability in logic cell usage, a better management of the need of re-synthesis and easier implementation.
While we cannot efficiently emulate quantum algorithms on classical architectures, we can move the weight of complexity from time to hardware resources. This paper describes a proposition of a universal and scalable quantum computer emulator, in which the FPGA hardware emulates the behavior of a real quantum system, capable of running quantum algorithms while maintaining their natural time complexity. The article also shows the proposed quantum emulator architecture, exposing a standard programming interface, and working results of an implementation of an exemplary quantum algorithm.
It can be shown that if quantum algorithms run on quantum computers, their processing speeds improve exponentially compared to their classical counterparts. However, due to the lack of quantum computers circuit model of quantum algorithms are currently simulated using classical computers to verify their functionalities. On the other hand, software simulation cannot use the intrinsic parallelism of quantum algorithm efficiently. To address the problem, in this paper hardware emulation of quantum algorithms are discussed. To emulate quantum algorithms using FPGAs, a new representation for quantum bits is emulated that improves the emulation of quantum circuits considerably. This representation could be used in both distinct and entangle qubit states.
Quantum computers are regarded as the future of computing, as they are believed to be capable of solving extremely complex problems that are intractable on conventional digital computers. However, near-term quantum computers are prone to a plethora of noise sources that are difficult to mitigate, possibly limiting their scalability and precluding us from running any useful algorithms. Quantum emulation is an alternative approach that uses classical analog hardware to emulate the properties of superposition and entanglement, thereby mimicking quantum parallelism to attain similar speeds. By contrast, the use of classical digital hardware, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), is less inefficient at emulating a quantum computer, as it does not take advantage of the fundamentally analog nature of quantum states. Consequently, this approach adds an inherent hardware overhead that also prevents scaling. In this work, an energy-efficient quantum emulator based on analog circuits realized in UMC 180-nm CMOS technology is proposed along with the design methodologies for a scalable computing architecture. A six-fold improvement in power consumption was observed over the FPGA-based approach for a ten-qubit emulation of Grover's search algorithm. The proposed emulator is also about 400 times faster than a Ryzen 5600x six-core processor performing a simulation of six-qubit Grover's search algorithm
Hardware emulation of quantum systems can mimic more efficiently the parallel behaviour of quantum computations, thus allowing higher processing speed-up than software simulations. In this paper, an efficient hardware emulation method that employs a serial-parallel hardware architecture targeted for field programmable gate array (FPGA) is proposed. Quantum Fourier transform and Grover’s search are chosen as case studies in this work since they are the core of many useful quantum algorithms. Experimental work shows that, with the proposed emulation architecture, a linear reduction in resource utilization is attained against the pipeline implementations proposed in prior works. The proposed work contributes to the formulation of a proof-of-concept baseline FPGA emulation framework with optimization on datapath designs that can be extended to emulate practical large-scale quantum circuits.
With rapid advancement in quantum computing technology, continuous efforts are being directed to simulation and emulation of quantum algorithms on classical platforms. A well-known limitation to classical emulation of quantum circuits is scalability. Existing hardware emulators implement gate-based circuit models of quantum circuits that result in heavy resource utilization and degrade the scalability of the system. Also, current quantum emulation hardware use fixedpoint arithmetic, which has an adverse effect on accuracy when the system is scaled up. In this work, we employ a complexmultiply-and-accumulate (CMAC) and lookup-based emulation approach that greatly reduces resource utilization and improves system scalability in terms of number of emulated qubits. We demonstrate emulation of up to 16 fully-entangled qubits which is highest among existing work. We design fully-pipelined, highthroughput hardware architectures that use floating-point precision for higher accuracy. Experimental evaluation and analysis of the architectures in terms of speed and area is also provided. The emulator is prototyped on a high-performance reconfigurable computing (HPRC) system and our results demonstrate quantitative improvement over existing Field-Programmable-Gate-Array (FPGA)-based hardware emulators.
Quantum hardware emulators using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been demonstrated to efficiently exploit the inherent parallelism of quantum algorithms and perform better than sequential software simulators. However, one key problem in mapping quantum circuits on FPGAs is the exponential increase in resource requirements with the increase in the number of quantum bits (qubits). As a result, the precision of hardware emulators is often reduced to save resources and accommodate larger quantum circuits which results in lower accuracy and lower throughput. In this paper, we present a full precision FPGA quantum emulator that uses 32-bit floating-point arithmetic and has a fully pipelined architecture. Our emulator is capable of emulating an entangled 4-qubit quantum system performing Quantum Fourier Transform, Grover's Search algorithms on a single FPGA node. Our experimental work was conducted on a highly scalable multi-node (multi-FPGA) state-of-the-art high-performance reconfigurable computer (HPRC). Experimental results show that our emulator is functionally accurate and has a higher operating frequency relative to other emulators. For emulating larger-scale circuits we propose using a multi-node architecture scheme with low latency, high bandwidth inter-node communication.