Performance Evaluation and Acceleration of the QTensor Quantum Circuit Simulator on GPUs

Abstract: This work studies the porting and optimization of the tensor network simulator QTensor on GPUs, with the ultimate goal of simulating quantum circuits efficiently at scale on large GPU supercomputers. We implement NumPy, PyTorch, and CuPy backends and benchmark the codes to find the optimal allocation of tensor simulations to either a CPU or a GPU. We also present a dynamic mixed backend to achieve optimal performance. To demonstrate the performance, we simulate QAOA circuits for computing the MaxCut energy expectation. Our method achieves $176\times$ speedup on a GPU over the NumPy baseline on a CPU for the benchmarked QAOA circuits to solve MaxCut problem on a 3-regular graph of size 30 with depth $p=4$.