JuliVQC: an Efficient Variational Quantum Circuit Simulator for Near-Term Quantum Algorithms

TL;DR

JuliVQC is a highly efficient, lightweight variational quantum circuit simulator implemented in Julia, supporting noise modeling and automatic differentiation, enabling advanced quantum circuit analysis and benchmarking.

Contribution

It introduces JuliVQC, a novel, high-performance quantum circuit simulator with optimized implementation, noise support, and automatic differentiation, tailored for near-term quantum algorithm research.

Findings

Performance is among the top of popular simulators.

Supports both noiseless and noisy quantum circuits.

Efficient for variational quantum algorithms and benchmarking.

Abstract

We introduce JuliVQC: a light-weight, yet extremely efficient variational quantum circuit simulator. JuliVQC is part of an effort for classical simulation of the \textit{Zuchongzhi} quantum processors, where it is extensively used to characterize the circuit noises, as a building block in the Schr$\ddot{\text{o}}$dinger-Feynman algorithm for classical verification and performance benchmarking, and for variational optimization of the Fsim gate parameters. The design principle of JuliVQC is three-fold: (1) Transparent implementation of its core algorithms, realized by using the high-performance script language Julia; (2) Efficiency is the focus, with a cache-friendly implementation of each elementary operations and support for shared-memory parallelization; (3) Native support of automatic differentiation for both the noiseless and noisy quantum circuits. We perform extensive numerical experiments on JuliVQC in different application scenarios, including quantum circuits, variational quantum circuits and their noisy counterparts, which show that its performance is among the top of the popular alternatives.