Intel Quantum Simulator: A cloud-ready high-performance simulator of quantum circuits
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Classical simulation of quantum computers will continue to play an essential role in the progress of quantum information science, both for numerical studies of quantum algorithms and for modelings noise and errors. Here we introduce the latest release of the Intel Quantum Simulator (IQS), formerly known as qHiPSTER. The high-performance computing (HPC) capability of the software allows users to leverage the available hardware resources provided by supercomputers, as well as available public cloud computing infrastructure. To take advantage of the latter platform, together with the distributed simulation of each separate quantum state, IQS offers the possibility of simulating a pool of related circuits in parallel. We highlight the technical implementation of the distributed algorithm and details about the new pool functionality. We also include some basic benchmarks (up to 42 qubits) and performance results obtained using HPC infrastructure. Finally, we use IQS to emulate a scenario in which many quantum devices are running in parallel to implement the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, using particle swarm optimization as the classical subroutine. The results demonstrate that the hyperparameters of this classical optimization algorithm depends on the total number of quantum circuit simulations one has the bandwidth to perform. The Intel Quantum Simulator has been released open-source with permissive licensing and is designed to simulate a large number of qubits, to emulate multiple quantum devices running in parallel, and/or to study the effects of decoherence and other hardware errors on calculation results.
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