Quantum circuit simulation is essential for researchers to develop and evaluate novel quantum algorithms with classical computers. Although full-state quantum circuit simulations are widely utilized for prototyping and debugging, they are computationally intensive due to the exponential growth in simulation time as the system size grows. To address the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional gate-by-gate simulation, this work refines the block-by-block simulation paradigm through blocking optimization, taking into account the architectural characteristics of hardware. The primary contribution of this research is the gate block search algorithm (GBSA), which efficiently groups the maximum number of quantum gates into gate blocks. This grouping technique enhances data reuse and reduces redundant memory accesses and I/O overhead during gate application. The proposed method is evaluated using both gate-level and circuit-level benchmarks on an AMD 64-core processor. Compared to conventional gate-by-gate simulators, such as QuEST and AerSimulator, the proposed approach achieves up to a 4.7× speedup in CPU execution and a 2.9× speedup in SSD-based scenarios. Furthermore, it can lead to a remarkable 46× reduction in memory and I/O traffic. These results indicate that the proposed block-based simulation strategy substantially improves the efficiency of quantum circuit simulation and can be readily adapted to multi-device environments, thereby supporting the rapid development of next-generation quantum algorithms.
Quantum circuit simulation is essential for researchers to develop and evaluate novel quantum algorithms with classical computers. Although full-state quantum circuit simulations are widely utilized for prototyping and debugging, they are computationally intensive due to the exponential growth in simulation time as the system size grows. To address the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional gate-by-gate simulation, this work refines the block-by-block simulation paradigm through blocking optimization, taking into account the architectural characteristics of hardware. The primary contribution of this research is the gate block search algorithm (GBSA), which efficiently groups the maximum number of quantum gates into gate blocks. This grouping technique enhances data reuse and reduces redundant memory accesses and I/O overhead during gate application. The proposed method is evaluated using both gate-level and circuit-level benchmarks on an AMD 64-core processor. Compared to conventional gate-by-gate simulators, such as QuEST and AerSimulator, the proposed approach achieves up to a 4.7× speedup in CPU execution and a 2.9× speedup in SSD-based scenarios. Furthermore, it can lead to a remarkable 46× reduction in memory and I/O traffic. These results indicate that the proposed block-based simulation strategy substantially improves the efficiency of quantum circuit simulation and can be readily adapted to multi-device environments, thereby supporting the rapid development of next-generation quantum algorithms.
Quantum circuit simulation is crucial for the development of quantum algorithms, particularly given the high cost and noise limitations of physical quantum hardware. While full-state quantum circuit simulation is commonly employed for prototyping and debugging, it poses challenges because of the exponential increase in simulation time for large quantum systems. In this work, we propose an extensible framework designed to enhance simulation performance by optimizing both data locality and computational efficiency, thereby addressing these challenges. This framework is seamlessly integrated with an optimizer that restructures quantum circuits and a simulator that adjusts execution strategies for various quantum operations. For the newly developed components, merge booster and diagonal detector, the underlying algorithms are inspired by the principles of quantum entanglement and gate fusion, as well as by the limitations identified in existing third-party simulation libraries. The experiments were conducted on eight DGX-H100 workstations, each equipped with eight NVIDIA H100 GPUs, employing both gate-level and circuit-level benchmarks. The results indicate a speedup of up to 160 times for circuit-level benchmarks and an acceleration of up to 34 times for diagonal-heavy gate-level benchmarks compared to existing simulators. The proposed methodologies are anticipated to deliver more robust and faster quantum circuit simulations, thereby fostering the advancement of novel quantum algorithms.
The trend towards optimization of quantum circuit simulators (QCS) has been driven by the rapid development of quantum computing, as there is a growing interest in creating high-efficiency QCS for quantum computing systems and applications. Despite this growth, the existing classical simulators pose challenges in simulating large quantum operations due to the exponential growth of memory and computation resources required. To overcome these issues, some studies have explored the use of non-volatile memory, such as solid-state disks (SSDs), to store a large amount of state vector while maintaining cost efficiency. However, such highly frequent read-and-write operations in large quantum simulations can quickly deplete the lifespan of SSDs, leading to overestimated practical efficiency and environmental concerns. Alternatively, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) can be used to expand memory capacity, allowing computers in a network to access remote memories with low latency and high bandwidth. Therefore, we propose using one-sided RDMA operations along with a series of optimizations to expand memory capacity and efficiently maximize the utilization of unused memory assets. The experimental results demonstrate that our approaches can be practically scaled up without any lifespan consumption. The proposed optimization can get a 3.0x speedup compared to the local memory approach and a maximum speedup of 2.0x compared to the naive RDMA-based approach, as observed in our benchmark test.
The classical simulation of quantum algorithms is a crucial tool for circuit development, testing, and validation. Although acceleration using GPUs significantly reduces simulation time, most high-performance simulators rely on vendor-specific frameworks that target data-center hardware. To broaden access to quantum simulation, this work proposes a vendor-agnostic approach targeting the integrated GPUs commonly found in consumer-grade laptops. A primary challenge in state-vector simulation is its inherently poor spatial locality, which creates a memory bandwidth bottleneck. Consequently, baseline implementations experience a severe degradation in relative GPU speedup as the number of simulated qubits increases. To address this limitation, we introduce a state partitioning optimization that reorganizes the quantum state vector to maximize the last-level cache locality and minimize costly main memory fetches. We evaluate this strategy using a Quantum Phase Estimation algorithm across diverse architectures from Intel, AMD, and Apple. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed optimization successfully mitigates performance degradation at larger qubit scales. In particular, for a 28-qubit simulation, the optimization reversed a performance deficit on an Intel Core i5, improving the GPU speedup over the CPU from 0.95x to 1.89x, and increased the Apple M1 Pro speedup from 3.71x to 5.88x. Overall, this approach yields consistent execution time improvements, demonstrating the viability of integrated GPUs for efficient quantum circuit simulation.
Simulating the behavior of quantum circuits on classical computers is one of the widely used approaches for current quantum computing device and quantum algorithm research. State- vector simulators keep all the quantum states in main memory, thus consuming a large amount of memory and resulting in significant memory access and communication overhead far longer than calculation time. Consequently, data communication time often becomes the primary bottleneck in quantum circuit simulation. Many classical simulators, such as QuEST, are designed to execute quantum gates serially without exploiting data locality, and all amplitudes need to be exchanged. Such a gate-unaware full-data communication scheme forces powerful computation such as GPUs to spend substantial time waiting for data transfers. In this paper, we propose a gate-aware on-demand communication quantum simulation framework to optimize communication overhead. We analyze the on-demand communication process and develop a communication cost model to elucidate the relationship between communication costs and circuit partition. Since greedy circuit partition method can only yield locally optimal solutions, we propose a choice-start-node quantum circuit partition method guided by the communication cost model to further reduce communication overhead in quantum circuit simulation. We evaluate on a 4-node cluster with 2 NVIDIA A100 GPUs on each node and our design achieves 59.32× speedup compared to the gate-unaware full-data communication scheme. Furthermore, compared to the greedy circuit partition method, our partition method can achieve simulation acceleration of 1.79×.
Optimizing and simulating quantum circuits at scale are critical bottlenecks in realizing the full potential of quantum computing. This thesis delivers a comprehensive suite of systems to overcome these limitations, spanning both physical compilation and classical simulation. For quantum circuit optimization, we first automate the discovery and verification of transformation rules by introducing Equivalence Circuit Class (ECC) sets and an efficient generation algorithm for arbitrary gate sets. We deploy these rules within the superoptimizer Quartz, which utilizes a cost-based backtracking search to escape local minima that trap traditional rule-based methods. To eliminate the exponential runtime penalties inherent to pure search, we introduce QALM, a hybrid optimization framework. By unifying search-based exploration with greedy rule-based exploitation in an interleaved control loop, QALM dynamically escapes local minima without exhaustive backtracking. Evaluated across a large benchmark suite of 248 diverse circuits, QALM outperforms existing search-based optimizers in final circuit quality while operating with the computational efficiency of rule-based systems. While the prior two approaches aim for global optimization, this problem is intrinsically QMA-hard, creating a bottleneck for large programs. To circumvent this issue and scale up, we introduce OAC, a cut-and-meld circuit optimization algorithm. OAC cuts a circuit into subcircuits, applies an existing oracle optimizer independently, and seamlessly melds the results. This algorithm operates with a linear number of oracle calls while attaining local optimality. Empirical evaluation shows that OAC significantly improves the efficiency of state-of-the-art optimizers while enhancing overall quality. Beyond physical execution, the scalable simulation of quantum circuits on classical hardware presents another major challenge. To address this, we present Atlas, a distributed GPU-based simulator that hierarchically partitions circuits to exploit data parallelism while minimizing communication overhead. By leveraging integer linear programming to allocate structurally related gates to nearby GPUs and dynamic programming for kernel scheduling, Atlas runs significantly faster than prior state-of-the-art GPU simulators. Together, these frameworks provide a robust toolchain, improving both the execution of quantum circuits on physical devices and their scalable classical simulation.
With the development of quantum computing, quantum processor demonstrates the potential supremacy in specific applications, such as Grover's database search and popular quantum neural networks (QNNs). For better calibrating the quantum algorithms and machines, quantum circuit simulation on classical computers becomes crucial. However, as the number of quantum bits (qubits) increases, the memory requirement grows exponentially. In order to reduce memory usage and accelerate simulation, we propose a multi-level optimization, namely Mera, by exploring memory and computation redundancy. First, for a large number of sparse quantum gates, we propose two compressed structures for low-level full-state simulation. The corresponding gate operations are designed for practical implementations, which are relieved from the longtime compression and decompression. Second, for the dense Hadamard gate, which is definitely used to construct the superposition, we design a customized structure for significant memory saving as a regularity-oriented simulation. Meanwhile, an ondemand amplitude updating process is optimized for execution acceleration. Experiments show that our compressed structures increase the number of qubits from 17 to 35, and achieve up to6.9×acceleration for QNN.