Abstract
We introduce QuEST, the Quantum Exact Simulation Toolkit, and compare it to ProjectQ, qHipster and a recent distributed implementation of Quantum++. QuEST is the first open source, hybrid multithreaded and distributed, GPU accelerated simulator of universal quantum circuits. Embodied as a C library, it is designed so that a user’s code can be deployed seamlessly to any platform from a laptop to a supercomputer. QuEST is capable of simulating generic quantum circuits of general one and two-qubit gates and multi-qubit controlled gates, on pure and mixed states, represented as state-vectors and density matrices, and under the presence of decoherence. Using the ARCUS and ARCHER supercomputers, we benchmark QuEST’s simulation of random circuits of up to 38 qubits, distributed over up to 2048 compute nodes, each with up to 24 cores. We directly compare QuEST’s performance to ProjectQ’s on single machines, and discuss the differences in distribution strategies of QuEST, qHipster and Quantum++. QuEST shows excellent scaling, both strong and weak, on multicore and distributed architectures.
Highlights
Target Platforms and Users.Simulations of quantum computation are performed on a wide variety of classical computational platforms, from standard laptops to the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and on standard CPUs or on accelerators such as GPUs
We review the performance of its simulator, which supports advanced vector extensions (AVX) instructions, employs OpenMP and cache blocking for efficient parallelisation on single-node shared-memory systems, and emulation to take computational shortcuts[28]
We studied ProjectQ’s performance for different combinations of compiler engines, number of gates considered in local optimisation and having gate fusion enabled, and found the above configurations gave the best performance for random circuits on our tested hardware
Summary
ProjectQ is an open-source quantum computing framework featuring a compiler targeting quantum hardware and a C++ quantum computer simulator behind a Python interface[27] In this text, we review the performance of its simulator, which supports AVX instructions, employs OpenMP and cache blocking for efficient parallelisation on single-node shared-memory systems, and emulation to take computational shortcuts[28]. Quest is light-weight, stand-alone, and tailored for high-performance resources - its low-level C interface can be compiled directly to a native executable and run on personal laptops and supercomputers Both QuEST and ProjectQ maintain a pure state in 2n complex floating point numbers for a system of n qubits, with (by default) double precision in each real and imaginary component; QuEST can otherwise be configured to use single or quad precision.
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