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Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation

Field Programmable Gate Arrays for Enhancing the Speed and Energy Efficiency of Quantum Dynamics Simulations

José M. Rodríguez-Borbón, Amin Kalantar, Sharma S. R. K. C. Yamijala, María Belén Oviedo, Walid A. Najjar, Bryan M. Wong

Published Mar 27, 2020• 29 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present the first application of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as new, customizable hardware architectures for carrying out fast and energy-efficient quantum dynamics simulations of large chemical/material systems. Instead of tailoring the software to fixed hardware, which is the typical case for writing quantum chemistry code for central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), FPGAs allow us to directly customize the underlying hardware (even at the level of specific electrical signals in the circuit) to give a truly optimized computational performance for quantum dynamics calculations. By offloading the most intensive and repetitive calculations onto an FPGA, we show that the computational performance of our real-time electron dynamics calculations can even exceed that of optimized commercial mathematical libraries running on high-performance GPUs. In addition to this impressive computational speedup, we show that FPGAs are immensely energy-efficient and consume 4 times less energy than modern GPU or CPU architectures. These energy savings are a practical and important metric for supercomputing centers (many of which exceed over $1 million in power costs alone), as exascale computing capabilities become more widespread and commonplace. Taken together, the implementation techniques and performance metrics of our study demonstrate that FPGAs could play a promising role in upcoming quantum chemistry and materials science applications, particularly for the acceleration and energy-efficient execution of quantum dynamics calculations.

DOI
10.1021/acs.jctc.9b01284

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We present the first application of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as new, customizable hardware architectures for carrying out fast and energy-efficient quantum dynamics simulations of large chemical/material systems. Instead of tailoring the software to fixed hardware, which is the typical case for writing quantum chemistry code for central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), FPGAs allow us to directly customize the underlying hardware (even at the level of specific electrical signals in the circuit) to give a truly optimized computational performance for quantum dynamics calculations. By offloading the most intensive and repetitive calculations onto an FPGA, we show that the computational performance of our real-time electron dynamics calculations can even exceed that of optimized commercial mathematical libraries running on high-performance GPUs. In addition to this impressive computational speedup, we show that FPGAs are immensely energy-efficient and consume 4 times less energy than modern GPU or CPU architectures. These energy savings are a practical and important metric for supercomputing centers (many of which exceed over $1 million in power costs alone), as exascale computing capabilities become more widespread and commonplace. Taken together, the implementation techniques and performance metrics of our study demonstrate that FPGAs could play a promising role in upcoming quantum chemistry and materials science applications, particularly for the acceleration and energy-efficient execution of quantum dynamics calculations.
We present the first application of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as new, customizable hardware architectures that can be harnessed for the fast and energy-efficient calculation of quantum dynamics simulations of large chemical/material systems. Instead of tailoring the software to fixed hardware (which is the typical case for writing quantum chemistry code for CPUs/GPUs), FPGAs allow us to directly customize the underlying hardware - even at the level of specific electrical signals in the circuit - to give a truly optimized computational performance for complex quantum dynamics calculations. By offloading the most intensive and repetitive calculations onto an FPGA, we show that the computational performance of our hardware implementation for real-time electron dynamics calculations can even exceed that of optimized commercial mathematical libraries running on high-performance GPUs. In addition to this impressive computational speedup, we show that FPGAs are immensely energy-efficient and consume 4 times less energy than modern GPU or CPU architectures. These energy savings are a practical and important metric for supercomputing centers (several of which exceed over $1 million in power costs alone), as exascale computing capabilities become more widespread and commonplace. Taken together, the implementation techniques and performance metrics of our study demonstrate that FPGAs could play a promising role in upcoming quantum chemistry and materials science applications, particularly for the acceleration and energy-efficient execution of quantum dynamics calculations.
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Abstract A new implementation of many-body calculations is of paramount importance in the field of computational physics. In this study, we leverage the capabilities of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for conducting quantum many-body calculations. Through the design of appropriate schemes for Monte Carlo and tensor network methods, we effectively utilize the parallel processing capabilities provided by FPGAs. This has resulted in a remarkable tenfold speedup compared to CPU-based computation for a Monte Carlo algorithm. We also demonstrate, for the first time, the utilization of FPGA to accelerate a typical tensor network algorithm. Our findings unambiguously highlight the significant advantages of hardware implementation and pave the way for novel approaches to many-body calculations.
Recent technological advances have led to a number of emerging platforms such as multi-cores, reconfigurable computing, and graphics processing units. We present a comparative study of multi-cores, field-programmable gate arrays, and graphics processing units for a Quantum Monte Carlo chemistry application. The speedups of these implementations are measured relative to a multi-core implementation and the accuracy of each implementation compared against the double-precision CPU implementation. The Brook+ AMD implementation shows the best overall speedup and accuracy, with the mixed-precision NVIDIA CUDA implementation outperforming the Brook+ implementation for larger atomic clusters with a slightly lower accuracy than the Brook+ and FPGA implementations. KeywordsQuantum Monte Carlo, Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, Multi-core processors, Graphics Processing Units.
Increasing the degree of freedom for quantum entanglement within tensor networks can enhance the depiction of the essence in many-body systems. However, this enhancement comes with a significant increase in computational complexity and critical slowing down, which drastically increases time consumption. This work converts a quantum tensor network algorithm into a classical circuit on the Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and arranges the computing unit with a dense parallel design, efficiently optimizing the time consumption. Test results show that the FPGA-based design achieves a computational speed 1.7 times greater than that of the central processing unit and is comparable to the graphics processing unit. This work explores a scalable and reusable approach suitable for parallel tensor operations implemented on FPGA, advancing research in quantum physics for many-body computing and quantum technologies.
Among the many computational models for quantum computing, the Quantum Circuit Model is the most well-known and used model for interacting with current quantum hardware. The practical implementation of quantum computers is a very active research field. Despite this progress, access to physical quantum computers remains relatively limited. Furthermore, the existing machines are susceptible to random errors due to quantum decoherence, as well as being limited in number of qubits, connectivity and built-in error correction. Simulation on classical hardware is therefore essential to allow quantum algorithm researchers to test and validate new algorithms in a simulated-error environment. Computing systems are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, using a variety of hardware accelerators to speed up computational tasks. One such type of accelerators, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), are reconfigurable circuits that can be programmed using standardized high-level programming models such as OpenCL and SYCL. FPGAs allow to create specialized highly-parallel circuits capable of mimicking the quantum parallelism properties of quantum gates, in particular for the class of quantum algorithms where many different computations can be performed concurrently or as part of a deep pipeline. They also benefit from very high internal memory bandwidth. This paper focuses on the analysis of quantum algorithms for applications in computational fluid dynamics. In this work we introduce novel quantum-circuit implementations of model lattice-based formulations for fluid dynamics, specifically the D1Q3 model using quantum computational basis encoding, as well as, efficient simulation of the circuits using FPGAs. This work forms a step toward quantum circuit formulation of the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM). For the quantum circuits implementing the nonlinear equilibrium distribution function in the D1Q3 lattice model, it is shown how circuit transformations can be introduced that facilitate the efficient simulation of the circuits on FPGAs, exploiting their fine-grained parallelism. We show that these transformations allow us to exploit more parallelism on the FPGA and improve memory locality. Preliminary results show that for this class of circuits the introduced transformations improve circuit execution time. We show that FPGA simulation of the reduced circuits results in more than 3× improvement in performance per Watt compared to the CPU simulation. We also present results from evaluating the same kernels on a GPU.