qTask: Task-parallel Quantum Circuit Simulation with Incrementality

TL;DR

qTask is a novel task-parallel quantum circuit simulator that efficiently updates state amplitudes incrementally, significantly outperforming existing simulators in both full and incremental quantum circuit simulations.

Contribution

The paper introduces qTask, a new incremental quantum circuit simulator that uses task-parallel decomposition and data partitioning to improve simulation speed and efficiency.

Findings

qTask is 1.46x faster than Qulacs for full simulation.

qTask is 5.77x faster than Qulacs for incremental simulation.

qTask outperforms Qiskit by 1.71x for full simulation and 9.76x for incremental updates.

Abstract

Incremental quantum circuit simulation has emerged as an important tool for simulation-driven quantum applications, such as circuit synthesis, verification, and analysis. When a small portion of the circuit is modified, the simulator must incrementally update state amplitudes for reasonable turnaround time and productivity. However, this type of incrementality has been largely ignored by existing research. To fill this gap, we introduce a new incremental quantum circuit simulator called qTask. qTask leverages a task-parallel decomposition strategy to explore both inter- and intra-gate operation parallelisms from partitioned data blocks. Our partitioning strategy effectively narrows down incremental update to a small set of partitions affected by circuit modifiers. We have demonstrated the promising performance of qTask on QASMBench benchmarks. Compared to two state-of-the-art simulators, Qulacs and Qiskit, qTask is respectively 1.46x and 1.71x faster for full simulation and 5.77x and 9.76x faster for incremental simulation.