Nowadays, although quantum computers are a re-ality, they are still in early stages of development. The presence of noisy qubits as well as the difficulties in accessing them, make quantum computing simulators a need for the scientific community. There are several simulators available and, while each one usually list their own characteristics, there is a lack of reports about their performance on concrete systems. In this work we have executed the Intel Quantum Simulator (IQS) on the LUSITANIA supercomputer to evaluate its scalability with respect to both the number of qubits and the depth of the quantum circuits using two self-developed benchmarks. The same tests have been run on a personal computer (PC), used as a baseline. The conclusions indicate that for complex circuits with 13 qubits or more, the execution time on HPC systems is consistently lower than on a PC, achieving speedups of up to 98 %. In addition, using HPC systems allows for the simulation of circuits with a higher qubit count (up to 4 more qubits) than what is possible on a PC due to the RAM requirements. This work provides the quantum research and development community with a comprehensive analysis of the behavior of the IQS on two distinct systems.
Nowadays, although quantum computers are a re-ality, they are still in early stages of development. The presence of noisy qubits as well as the difficulties in accessing them, make quantum computing simulators a need for the scientific community. There are several simulators available and, while each one usually list their own characteristics, there is a lack of reports about their performance on concrete systems. In this work we have executed the Intel Quantum Simulator (IQS) on the LUSITANIA supercomputer to evaluate its scalability with respect to both the number of qubits and the depth of the quantum circuits using two self-developed benchmarks. The same tests have been run on a personal computer (PC), used as a baseline. The conclusions indicate that for complex circuits with 13 qubits or more, the execution time on HPC systems is consistently lower than on a PC, achieving speedups of up to 98 %. In addition, using HPC systems allows for the simulation of circuits with a higher qubit count (up to 4 more qubits) than what is possible on a PC due to the RAM requirements. This work provides the quantum research and development community with a comprehensive analysis of the behavior of the IQS on two distinct systems.
The increasing complexity of quantum algorithms and the limitations of current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware underscore the importance of efficient classical simulators. To support informed decision-making by users of quantum circuit simulators, we benchmark seven statevector-based quantum circuit simulators (Qiskit, Qulacs, Qibo, Qsimov, Cirq, Pennylane and the Intel Quantum Simulator (IQS)) on a multicore node of the Lusitania high-performance computing (HPC) system. We evaluate their performance in terms of execution time, memory usage and core scalability using Grover’s algorithm, the quantum Fourier transform (QFT), and quantum volume (QV) circuits, across qubit counts ranging from 3 to 30. Our results reveal that Qulacs offers the best performance for circuits below 22 qubits, while Qiskit becomes the fastest for larger and more complex circuits. Qiskit and Qulacs achieve the most efficient parallel performance across multiple cores, while others display limited scaling benefits. IQS shows the lowest memory consumption in QFT and QV benchmarks for systems under 24 qubits; however, it suffers from higher execution times, particularly for Grover’s algorithm. The experimental implementation of Qsimov consistently underperforms in both runtime and scalability; for this reason, it is employed as a baseline in our measurements, serving to highlight the importance of performance optimizations in statevector-based quantum circuit simulators. Previous findings provide a comprehensive performance landscape to guide researchers in selecting appropriate simulators for both standard and large-scale quantum workloads on HPC infrastructures.
Abstract Classical simulation of quantum computers will continue to play an essential role in the progress of quantum information science, both for numerical studies of quantum algorithms and for modeling noise and errors. Here we introduce the latest release of Intel Quantum Simulator (IQS), formerly known as qHiPSTER. The high-performance computing (HPC) capability of the software allows users to leverage the available hardware resources provided by supercomputers, as well as available public cloud computing infrastructure. To take advantage of the latter platform, together with the distributed simulation of each separate quantum state, IQS allows to subdivide the computational resources to simulate a pool of related circuits in parallel. We highlight the technical implementation of the distributed algorithm and details about the new pool functionality. We also include some basic benchmarks (up to 42 qubits) and performance results obtained using HPC infrastructure. Finally, we use IQS to emulate a scenario in which many quantum devices are running in parallel to implement the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, using particle swarm optimization as the classical subroutine. The results demonstrate that the hyperparameters of this classical optimization algorithm depends on the total number of quantum circuit simulations one has the bandwidth to perform. Intel Quantum Simulator has been released open-source with permissive licensing and is designed to simulate a large number of qubits, to emulate multiple quantum devices running in parallel, and/or to study the effects of decoherence and other hardware errors on calculation results.
The shortage of quantum computers, and their current state of development, constraints research in many fields that could benefit from quantum computing. Although the work of a quantum computer can be simulated with classical computing, personal computers take so long to run quantum experiments that they are not very useful for the progress of research. This manuscript presents an open quantum computing simulation platform that enables quantum computing researchers to have access to high performance simulations. This platform, called QUTE, relies on a supercomputer powerful enough to simulate general purpose quantum circuits of up to 38 qubits, and even more under particular simulations. This manuscript describes in-depth the characteristics of the QUTE platform and the results achieved in certain classical experiments in this field, which would give readers an accurate idea of the system capabilities.
In the nearest future quantum computers will be suitable for practical use. The development of quantum algorithms can be carried out using classical computers and specialized software that allows simulating of a quantum circuit functioning. Simulation results can be used to analyze the algorithm and also contribute to co-design when developing quantum architectures. However, when planning and performing numerical experiments, it is necessary to understand the capabilities of simulators and the limitations on the parameters of the quantum circuit imposed by the characteristics of the available classical computational resources (computers). This paper presents the results of computational experiments on simulating the operation of quantum circuits on an ideal quantum computer using the QuEST and Intel-QS packages, as well as our own "naïve" implementation. Restrictions on the size of a simulated quantum system N are shown when using computing systems of various classes — a virtual machine, a computing server, a computing server with a graphics accelerator (GPU), a supercomputer (the maximum achieved size is N = 33). The performance and scalability characteristics of the considered implementations on shared and distributed memory are given (the observed scaling efficiency is 30 % and 70 %, respectively). For the QuEST package and our own implementation the performance is presented for systems with graphics accelerator (GPU).
Scientific applications are starting to explore the viability of quantum computing. This exploration typically begins with quantum simulations that can run on existing classical platforms, albeit without the performance advantages of real quantum resources. In the context of high-performance computing (HPC), the incorporation of simulation software can often take advantage of the powerful resources to help scale-up the simulation size. The configuration, installation and operation of these quantum simulation packages on HPC resources can often be rather daunting and increases friction for experimentation by scientific application developers. We describe a framework to help streamline access to quantum simulation software running on HPC resources. This includes an interface for circuit-based quantum computing tasks, as well as the necessary resource management infrastructure to make effective use of the underlying HPC resources. The primary contributions of this work include a classification of different usage models for quantum simulation in an HPC context, a review of the software architecture for our approach and a detailed description of the prototype implementation to experiment with these ideas using two different simulators (TNQVM & NWQ-Sim). We include initial experimental results running on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) using a synthetic workload generated via the SupermarQ quantum benchmarking framework.
Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionise multiple fields by solving complex problems that cannot be solved in reasonable time with current classical computers. Nevertheless, the development of quantum computers is still in its early stages and the available systems have still very limited resources. As such, currently, the most practical way to develop and test quantum algorithms is to use classical simulators of quantum computers. In addition, the development of new quantum computers and their components also depends on simulations. Given the characteristics of a quantum computer, their simulation is a very demanding application in terms of both computation and memory. As such, simulations do not scale well in current classical systems. Thus different optimisation and approximation techniques need to be applied at different levels. This review provides an overview of the components of a quantum computer, the levels at which these components and the whole quantum computer can be simulated, and an in-depth analysis of different state-of-the-art acceleration approaches. Besides the optimisations that can be performed at the algorithmic level, this review presents the most promising hardware-aware optimisations and future directions that can be explored for improving the performance and scalability of the simulations.