Benchmarking Supercomputers with the J\"ulich Universal Quantum Computer Simulator

TL;DR

This paper benchmarks the performance of a universal quantum computer simulator on top supercomputers, demonstrating near-ideal scaling and innovative memory reduction techniques for simulating up to 48 qubits.

Contribution

It introduces a massively parallel quantum computer simulator and demonstrates its scalability and efficiency on leading supercomputers, including novel memory optimization methods.

Findings

Near-ideal scaling on top supercomputers

Simulation of up to 48 qubits with memory reduction

Effective decomposition of entangling gates for larger circuits

Abstract

We use a massively parallel simulator of a universal quantum computer to benchmark some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. We find nearly ideal scaling behavior on the Sunway TaihuLight, the K computer, the IBM BlueGene/Q JUQUEEN, and the Intel Xeon based clusters JURECA and JUWELS. On the Sunway TaihuLight and the K computer, universal quantum computers with up to 48 qubits can be simulated by means of an adaptive two-byte encoding to reduce the memory requirements by a factor of eight. Additionally, we discuss an alternative approach to alleviate the memory bottleneck by decomposing entangling gates such that low-depth circuits with a much larger number of qubits can be simulated.