Queen: A quick, scalable, and comprehensive quantum circuit simulation for supercomputing

TL;DR

Queen is a scalable quantum circuit simulation toolkit that significantly outperforms existing simulators in speed and efficiency, enabling faster development and validation of quantum algorithms on supercomputers.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel, cache-aware quantum circuit simulation toolkit with optimized modules, achieving substantial performance improvements over prior simulators.

Findings

Average 9x speedup over QuEST, IBM-Aer, and NVIDIA-cuQuantum

FLOPS increased by up to 8 times

Arithmetic intensity improved by 96 times

Abstract

The state vector-based simulation offers a convenient approach to developing and validating quantum algorithms with noise-free results. However, limited by the absence of cache-aware implementations and unpolished circuit optimizations, the past simulators were severely constrained in performance, leading to stagnation in quantum computing. In this paper, we present an innovative quantum circuit simulation toolkit comprising gate optimization and simulation modules to address these performance challenges. For the performance, scalability, and comprehensive evaluation, we conduct a series of particular circuit benchmarks and strong scaling tests on a DGX-A100 workstation and achieve averaging 9 times speedup compared to state-of-the-art simulators, including QuEST, IBM-Aer, and NVIDIA-cuQuantum. Moreover, the critical performance metric FLOPS increases by up to a factor of 8-fold, and arithmetic intensity experiences a remarkable 96x enhancement. We believe the proposed toolkit paves the way for faster quantum circuit simulations, thereby facilitating the development of novel quantum algorithms.