Simulating Quantum Computers Using OpenCL

Abstract

Quantum computing is an emerging technology, promising a paradigm shift in computing, and allowing for speedups in many different problems. However, quantum devices are still in their early stages, most with only a small number qubits. This places a reliance on simulation to develop quantum algorithms and to verify these devices. While there exists many algorithms for the simulation of quantum circuits, there is (at the time of writing) no tools which use OpenCL to parallelize this simulation, thereby taking advantage of devices such as GPUs while still remaining portable. In this paper, such a tool is described, including optimizations in areas such as gate application. This leads to a new approach that outperforms other popular state vector based simulators. An implementation of the proposed simulator is available at https://qcgpu.github.io.

13 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• A Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm
• Simulation of low-depth quantum circuits as complex undirected graphical models
• Classical Simulation of Intermediate-Size Quantum Circuits
• Distributed Memory Techniques for Classical Simulation of Quantum Circuits

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Qulacs: a fast and versatile quantum circuit simulator for research purpose
• Qibo: a framework for quantum simulation with hardware acceleration
• Benchmarking Quantum Computer Simulation Software Packages: State Vector Simulators
• Qibolab: an open-source hybrid quantum operating system
• Qsun: an open-source platform towards practical quantum machine learning applications
• Realistic simulation of quantum computation using unitary and measurement channels