Toward cost-effective quantum circuit simulation with performance tuning techniques

Quantum circuit simulation is a popular approach to evaluating novel quantum algorithms before a physical quantum computer is available. Unfortunately, the simulation is often done with the full-state quantum circuit simulation scheme, and a huge memory space required by a full-state simulator is a limiting factor for the simulation of a larger qubit system. In this work, in order to support the simulation of a broadened qubit system, storage devices are introduced into the full-state quantum circuit simulation. A vertical qubit simulation design is proposed for the storage-based, full-state quantum circuit simulation, including qubit representation, threading model, and parallel state manipulations over storage devices. An empirical method of simulator parameter tuning is developed to achieve higher simulation performance. Our experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art memory-only simulator (QuEST), the storage-based simulation can achieve a 61x higher cost-delay ratio and can simulate a 39-qubit system on a commodity computer. The encouraging results indicate that our proposed simulator can help scale the full-state simulation for larger quantum circuits and achieve higher performance via the performance tuning method.