Quantum simulation with just-in-time compilation

TL;DR

This paper introduces qibojit, a JIT compilation module for quantum circuit simulation in Python, enabling efficient, readable, and portable simulations across CPU and GPU architectures, with performance comparable to existing libraries.

Contribution

The paper presents qibojit, a new JIT compilation-based module for quantum simulation that simplifies implementation while maintaining high performance across diverse hardware.

Findings

Qibojit achieves performance comparable to existing quantum simulation libraries.

JIT compilation simplifies complex quantum simulation code.

The approach is effective on both CPU and GPU architectures.

Abstract

Quantum technologies are moving towards the development of novel hardware devices based on quantum bits (qubits). In parallel to the development of quantum devices, efficient simulation tools are needed in order to design and benchmark quantum algorithms and applications before deployment on quantum hardware. In this context, we present a first attempt to perform circuit-based quantum simulation using the just-in-time (JIT) compilation technique on multiple hardware architectures and configurations based on single-node central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). One of the major challenges in scientific code development is to balance the level of complexity between algorithms and programming techniques without losing performance or degrading code readability. In this context, we have developed qibojit: a new module for the Qibo quantum computing framework, which uses a just-in-time compilation approach through Python. We perform systematic performance benchmarks between our JIT approach and a subset of relevant publicly available libraries for quantum computing. We show that our novel approach simplifies the complex aspects of the implementation without deteriorating performance.