phase2: Full-State Vector Simulation of Quantum Time Evolution at Scale
arXiv:2504.17881 · doi:10.1038/s44488-026-00002-2
phase2 is a full-state-vector quantum simulator that efficiently handles many-qubit Pauli rotation circuits on distributed CPU/GPU clusters, achieving large speedups and scaling to 40 qubits on 512 GPUs while showing empirical Trotter errors far below theoretical bounds.
Abstract
Classical simulation of quantum computers is essential for designing and benchmarking quantum algorithms. Here we present phase2, a full-state-vector simulator optimised for sequences of many-qubit Pauli rotations on distributed CPU and GPU clusters. Exploiting the common-suffix structure of Pauli-rotation circuits, the implementation reduces inter-node communication and achieves two orders of magnitude speedup for grouped rotations. We demonstrate weak and strong scaling to 40 qubits across 512 NVIDIA H100 GPUs using 32 TB of distributed memory. Applying the simulator to Hamiltonian time evolution of ruthenium-ligand active spaces up to 40 qubits, we find that the empirical Trotter error lies more than two orders of magnitude below the rigorous analytic upper bound for every active space in which the fit converged (up to 32 qubits). Practical circuit depths and simulation costs are therefore substantially smaller than the conservative estimates suggest.
33 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables. Author's version of the article published in Communications AI & Computing; supplementary material included after the main text