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arXiv:quant-ph/0208003

Gate-Level Simulation of Quantum Circuits

George F. Viamontes, Manoj Rajagopalan, Igor L. Markov, John P. Hayes

Published Aug 1, 2002• 0 citations
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Abstract

While thousands of experimental physicists and chemists are currently trying to build scalable quantum computers, it appears that simulation of quantum computation will be at least as critical as circuit simulation in classical VLSI design. However, since the work of Richard Feynman in the early 1980s little progress was made in practical quantum simulation. Most researchers focused on polynomial-time simulation of restricted types of quantum circuits that fall short of the full power of quantum computation. Simulating quantum computing devices and useful quantum algorithms on classical hardware now requires excessive computational resources, making many important simulation tasks infeasible. In this work we propose a new technique for gate-level simulation of quantum circuits which greatly reduces the difficulty and cost of such simulations. The proposed technique is implemented in a simulation tool called the Quantum Information Decision Diagram (QuIDD) and evaluated by simulating Grover's quantum search algorithm. The back-end of our package, QuIDD Pro, is based on Binary Decision Diagrams, well-known for their ability to efficiently represent many seemingly intractable combinatorial structures. This reliance on a well-established area of research allows us to take advantage of existing software for BDD manipulation and achieve unparalleled empirical results for quantum simulation.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0208003

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While thousands of experimental physicists and chemists are currently trying to build scalable quantum computers, it appears that simulation of quantum computation will be at least as critical as circuit simulation in classical VLSI design. However, since the work of Richard Feynman in the early 1980s little progress was made in practical quantum simulation. Most researchers focused on polynomial-time simulation of restricted types of quantum circuits that fall short of the full power of quantum computation. Simulating quantum computing devices and useful quantum algorithms on classical hardware now requires excessive computational resources, making many important simulation tasks infeasible. In this work we propose a new technique for gate-level simulation of quantum circuits which greatly reduces the difficulty and cost of such simulations. The proposed technique is implemented in a simulation tool called the Quantum Information Decision Diagram (QuIDD) and evaluated by simulating Grover's quantum search algorithm. The back-end of our package, QuIDD Pro, is based on Binary Decision Diagrams, well-known for their ability to efficiently represent many seemingly intractable combinatorial structures. This reliance on a well-established area of research allows us to take advantage of existing software for BDD manipulation and achieve unparalleled empirical results for quantum simulation.
Simulating quantum computation on a classical computer is a difficult problem. The matrices representing quantum gates, and vectors modeling qubit states grow exponentially with an increase in the number of qubits. However, by using a new data structure called the Quantum Information Decision Diagram (QuIDD) that exploits the structure of quantum operators, many of these matrices and vectors can be represented in a form that grows polynomially. Using QuIDDs, we implemented a general-purpose quantum computing simulator in C++ called QuIDDPro and tested it on Grover's algorithm. Our QuIDD technique asymptotically outperforms other known simulation techniques.
Quantum-mechanical phenomena are playing an increasing role in information processing as transistor sizes approach the nanometer level, while the securest forms of communication rely on quantum data encoding. When they involve a finite number of basis states, these phenomena can be modeled as quantum circuits, the quantum analogue of conventional or classical logic circuits. Simulation of quantum circuits can therefore be used as a tool to evaluate issues in the design of quantum information processors. Unfortunately, simulating such phenomena efficiently is exceedingly difficult. The matrices representing quantum operators (gates) and vectors modeling quantum states grow exponentially with the number of quantum bits. The information represented by quantum states and operators often exhibits structure that can be exploited when simulating certain classes of quantum circuits. We study the development of simulation methods that run on classical computers and take advantage of such repetitions and redundancies. In particular, we define a new data structure for simulating quantum circuits called the quantum information decision diagram (QuIDD). A QuIDD is a compressed graph representation of a vector or matrix and permits computations to be performed directly on the compressed data. We develop a comprehensive set of algorithms for operating on QuIDDs in both the state-vector and density-matrix formats, and evaluate their complexity. These algorithms have been implemented in a general-purpose simulator program for quantum-mechanical applications called QuIDDPro. Through extensive experiments conducted on representative quantum simulation applications, including Grover's search algorithm, error characterization, and reversible circuits, we demonstrate that QuIDDPro is faster than other existing quantum-mechanical simulators such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology's QCSim program, and is far more memory-efficient. Using QuIDDPro, we explore the advantages of quantum computation over classical computation, simulate quantum errors and error correction, and study the impact of numerical precision on the fidelity of simulations. We also develop several novel algorithms for testing quantum circuit equivalence and compare them empirically. The QuIDDPro software is equipped with a user-friendly interface and is distributed with numerous example scripts. It has been used as a laboratory supplement for quantum computing courses at several universities.
Simulating quantum computation on a classical computer is a difficult problem. The matrices representing quantum gates, and vectors modeling qubit states grow exponentially with the number of qubits. It has been shown experimentally that the QuIDD (Quantum Information Decision Diagram) datastructure greatly facilitates simulations using memory and runtime that are polynomial in the number of qubits. In this paper, we present a complexity analysis which formally describes this class of matrices and vectors. We also present an improved implementation of QuIDDs which can simulate Grover's algorithm for quantum search with the asymptotic runtime complexity of an ideal quantum computer up to negligible overhead.
Since quantum computers can solve important problems faster than classical computers, many resources have gone into the development of this technology in recent decades. Despite the tremendous progress that has already been made toward the development of quantum computers, they are still an emerging technology, which restricts access and reliability. Thus, research on quantum algorithms still heavily relies on quantum circuit simulators that run on classical hardware. However, simulating the execution of a quantum computer on conventional hardware is exponentially difficult, which is also the reason why quantum computing is an interesting technology in the first place. Particularly complex is noise-aware simulation of quantum computers, i.e., the consideration of noise effects that are common in today’s quantum hardware during quantum circuit simulation. In this work, we investigate the use of decision diagrams for this task. To this end, we present two distinct approaches for noise-aware quantum circuit simulation, investigate how they can be realized using decision diagrams, and implement decision diagram-based solutions for each of the presented noise-aware simulation schemes. In an extensive evaluation, we unveil potential for further improvements and also demonstrate substantial speed-ups compared to the current state of the art.
Simulating quantum computation on a classical com-puter is a difficult problem. The matrices representing quantum gates, and vectors modeling qubit states grow ex-ponentially with the number of qubits. It has been shown ex-perimentally that the QuIDD (Quantum Information Deci-sion Diagram) datastructure greatly facilitates simulations using memory and runtime that are polynomial in the num-ber of qubits. In this paper, we present a complexity analysis which formally describes this class of matrices and vectors. We also present an improved implementation of QuIDDs which can simulate Grover’s algorithm for quantum search with the asymptotic runtime complexity of an ideal quantum computer up to negligible overhead. 1.
Quantum computers promise to solve important problems faster than conventional computers ever could. Underneath is a fundamentally different computational primitive that introduces new challenges for the development of software tools that aid designers of corresponding quantum algorithms. The different computational primitives render classical simulation of quantum circuits particularly challenging. While the logic simulation of conventional circuits is comparatively simple with linear complexity with respect to the number of gates, quantum circuit simulation has to deal with the exponential memory requirements to represent quantum states on non-quantum hardware with respect to the number of qubits. Decision Diagrams (DDs) address this challenge through exploitation of redundancies in matrices and vectors to provide significantly more compact representations in many cases. Moreover, the probabilistic nature of quantum computations enables another angle to tackle the complexity: Quantum algorithms are resistant to some degree against small inaccuracies in the quantum state as these only lead to small changes in the outcome probabilities. We propose to exploit this resistance against (small) errors to gain even more compact decision diagrams. In this work, we investigate the potential of approximation in quantum circuit simulation in detail. To this end, we first present four dedicated schemes that exploit the error resistance and efficiently approximate quantum states represented by decision diagrams. Subsequently, we propose two simulation strategies that utilize those approximations schemes in order to improve the efficiency of DD-based quantum circuit simulation, while, at the same time, allowing the user to control the resulting degradation in accuracy. We empirically show that the proposed approximation schemes reduce the size of decision diagrams substantially and also analytically prove the effect of multiple approximations on the attained accuracy. Eventually, this enables speed-ups of the resulting approximate quantum circuit simulation of up to several orders of magnitudes—again, while controlling the fidelity of the result.