High Performance Emulation of Quantum Circuits

Abstract: As quantum computers of non-trivial size become available in the near future, it is imperative to develop tools to emulate small quantum computers. This allows for validation and debugging of algorithms as well as exploring hardware-software co-design to guide the development of quantum hardware and architectures. The simulation of quantum computers entails multiplications of sparse matrices with very large dense vectors of dimension $2^n$, where $n$ denotes the number of qubits, making this a memory-bound and network bandwidth-limited application. We introduce the concept of a quantum computer \textit{emulator} as a component of a software framework for quantum computing, enabling a significant performance advantage over simulators by emulating quantum algorithms at a high level rather than simulating individual gate operations. We describe various optimization approaches and present benchmarking results, establishing the superiority of quantum computer emulators in terms of performance.