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International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)

BQSim: GPU-accelerated Batch Quantum Circuit Simulation using Decision Diagram

Shui Jiang, Yi-Hua Chung, Chih-Chun Chang, Tsung-Yi Ho, Tsung‐Wei Huang

Published Mar 27, 2025• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum circuit simulation (QCS) plays an important role in the designs and analysis of a quantum algorithm, as it assists researchers in understanding how quantum operations work without accessing expensive quantum computers. Despite many QCS methods, they are largely limited to simulating one input at a time. However, many simulation-driven quantum computing applications, such as testing and verification, require simulating multiple inputs to reason a quantum algorithm under different scenarios. We refer to this type of QCS as batch quantum circuit simulation (BQCS). In this paper, we present BQSim, a GPU-accelerated batch quantum circuit simulator. BQSim is inspired by the state-of-the-art decision diagram (DD) that can compactly represent quantum gate matrices, but overcomes its limitation of CPU-centric simulation. Specifically, BQSim uses DD to optimize a quantum circuit for reduced BQCS computation and converts DD to a GPU-efficient data structure. Additionally, BQSim employs a task graph-based execution strategy to minimize repetitive kernel call overhead and efficiently overlap kernel execution with data movement. Compared with three state-of-the-art quantum circuit simulators, cuQuantum, Qiskit Aer, and FlatDD, BQSim is 3.25×, 159.06×, and 311.42× faster on average.

DOI
10.1145/3676641.3715984

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Quantum circuit simulation (QCS) plays an important role in the designs and analysis of a quantum algorithm, as it assists researchers in understanding how quantum operations work without accessing expensive quantum computers. Despite many QCS methods, they are largely limited to simulating one input at a time. However, many simulation-driven quantum computing applications, such as testing and verification, require simulating multiple inputs to reason a quantum algorithm under different scenarios. We refer to this type of QCS as batch quantum circuit simulation (BQCS). In this paper, we present BQSim, a GPU-accelerated batch quantum circuit simulator. BQSim is inspired by the state-of-the-art decision diagram (DD) that can compactly represent quantum gate matrices, but overcomes its limitation of CPU-centric simulation. Specifically, BQSim uses DD to optimize a quantum circuit for reduced BQCS computation and converts DD to a GPU-efficient data structure. Additionally, BQSim employs a task graph-based execution strategy to minimize repetitive kernel call overhead and efficiently overlap kernel execution with data movement. Compared with three state-of-the-art quantum circuit simulators, cuQuantum, Qiskit Aer, and FlatDD, BQSim is 3.25×, 159.06×, and 311.42× faster on average.
Quantum circuit simulator (QCS) is essential for designing quantum algorithms because it assists researchers in understanding how quantum operations work without access to expensive quantum computers. Traditional array-based QCSs suffer from exponential time and memory complexities. To address this problem, Decision Diagram (DD) was introduced to compress simulation data by exploring the circuit regularity. However, for irregular circuit structures, DD-based simulation incurs significant runtime and memory overhead. To overcome this challenge, we present FlatDD, a high-performance QCS that capitalizes on the strength of both DD- and array-based approaches. FlatDD parallelizes the simulation workload at multiple levels and leverages an efficient caching technique to reuse historical results. To further enhance the simulation performance for deep circuits, FlatDD introduces a gate-fusion algorithm to reduce the computational cost. Compared to state-of-the-art QCSs on commonly used quantum circuits, FlatDD achieves 34.81× speed-up and 1.93× memory reduction.
Quantum circuit simulator (QCS) is essential for designing quantum algorithms because it assists researchers in understanding how quantum operations work without access to expensive quantum computers. Traditional array-based QCSs suffer from exponential time and memory complexities. To address this problem, Decision Diagram (DD) was introduced to compress simulation data by exploring the circuit regularity. However, for irregular circuit structures, DD-based simulation incurs significant runtime and memory overhead. To overcome this challenge, we present FlatDD, a parallel QCS that capitalizes on the strength of both DD- and array-based approaches. FlatDD parallelizes the simulation workload at multiple levels and leverages caching to reuse historical results. To further enhance the simulation performance for deep circuits, FlatDD introduces a gate-fusion algorithm to reduce the computational cost. Compared to state-of-the-art QCSs on commonly used quantum circuits, FlatDD achieves 54.35 × speed-up and 1.91 × memory reduction.
In recent years, quantum computing has undergone significant developments and has established its supremacy in many application domains. While quantum hardware is accessible to the public through the cloud environment, a robust and efficient quantum circuit simulator is necessary to investigate the constraints and foster quantum computing development, such as quantum algorithm development and quantum device architecture exploration. In this paper, we observe that most of the publicly available quantum circuit simulators (e.g., QISKit from IBM, QDK from Microsoft, and Qsim-Cirq from Google) suffer from slow simulation and poor scalability when the number of qubits increases. To this end, we systematically investigate the deficiencies in quantum circuit simulation (QCS) and propose Q-GPU, a framework that leverages GPUs with comprehensive optimizations to allow efficient and scalable QCS. Specifically, Q-GPU features i) proactive state amplitude transfer, ii) zero state amplitude pruning, iii) delayed qubit involvement, and iv) lossless nonzero state amplitude compression. Experimental results across nine representative quantum circuits indicate that Q-GPU significantly reduces the execution time of the state-of-the-art GPU-based QCS by 71.89% (3.55× speedup). Q-GPU also outperforms the state-of-the-art OpenMP CPU implementation, the Google Qsim-Cirq simulator, and the Microsoft QDK simulator by 1.49×, 2.02×, and 10.82×, respectively.
Despite recent progress in physical implementations of quantum computers, a significant amount of research still depends on simulating quantum computations on classical computers. Here, most state-of-the-art simulators rely on array-based approaches which are perfectly suited for acceleration through concurrency using multi- or many-core processors. However, those methods have exponential memory complexities and, hence, become infeasible if the considered quantum circuits are too large. To address this drawback, complementary approaches based on decision diagrams (called DD-based simulation) have been proposed which provide more compact representations in many cases. While this allows to simulate quantum circuits that could not be simulated before, it is unclear whether DD-based simulation also allows for similar acceleration through concurrency as array-based approaches. In this work, we investigate this issue. The resulting findings provide a better understanding about when DD-based simulation can be accelerated through concurrent executions of sub-tasks and when not.
Since people became aware of the power of quantum phenomena in the domain of traditional computation, a great number of complex problems that were once considered intractable in the classical world have been tackled. The downsides of quantum supremacy are its high cost and unpredictability. In order to obtain a stronger control over quantum interactions(by reducing its noise) and reduce its cost, numerous researchers are relying on quantum simulators running on classical computers. The critical obstacle facing classical computers in the task of quantum simulation is its limited memory space. Quantum simulation intrinsically models the state evolution of quantum subsystems, i.e., qubits. Qubits are mathematically constructed in Hilbert space whose size grows exponentially with its number. Consequently, the scalability of the straightforward statevector approach is limited. It has been proven effective to adopt decision diagrams to mitigate the memory cost issue in various fields. In recent years, researchers have adapted decision diagrams into different forms for representing quantum states and performing quantum calculations efficiently. This leads to the study of decision diagram based quantum simulation. However, their advantage of memory efficiency does not let it replace the mainstream statevector and tensor network based approaches. We argue the reason is the lack of effective parallelization strategies in performing calculations on decision diagrams. In this work, we explore several strategies for parallelizing decision diagram operations with the focus on leveraging them for quantum simulations. The target is to find the optimal parallelization strategies and improve the performance of decision diagram based quantum simulation. Based on the experiment results, our proposed strategy achieves a 2-3 times faster simulation of Grover's algorithm and random circuits than the state-of-the-art single-thread DD-based simulator DDSIM.
Fast execution of complex quantum circuit simulations are crucial for verification of theoretical algorithms paving the way for their successful execution on the quantum hardware. However, the main stream CPU-based platforms for circuit simulation are well-established but slower. Despite this, adoption of GPU platforms remains limited because different hardware architectures require specialized quantum simulation frameworks, each with distinct implementations and optimization strategies. Therefore, we introduce Q-Gear, a software framework that transforms Qiskit quantum circuits into Cuda-Q kernels. By leveraging Cuda-Q seamless execution on GPUs, Q-Gear accelerates both CPU and GPU based simulations by respectively two orders of magnitude and ten times with minimal coding effort. Furthermore, Q-Gear leverages Cuda-Q configuration to interconnect GPUs memory allowing the execution of much larger circuits, beyond the memory limit set by a single GPU or CPU node. Additionally, we created and deployed a Podman container and a Shifter image at Perlmutter (NERSC/LBNL), both derived from NVIDIA public image. These public NERSC containers were optimized for the Slurm job scheduler allowing for close to 100% GPU utilization. We present various benchmarks of the Q-Gear to prove the efficiency of our computation paradigm.