Tensor Network Quantum Virtual Machine for Simulating Quantum Circuits at Exascale

• Published in: ACM transactions on quantum computing (Print) 2022-10, Vol.4 (1), p.1-21, Article 6
• Main Authors: Nguyen, Thien, Lyakh, Dmitry, Dumitrescu, Eugene, Clark, David, Larkin, Jeff, McCaskey, Alexander
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Hardware; Quantum computation
• ISSN: 2643-6809; 2643-6817
• DOI: 10.1145/3547334

The numerical simulation of quantum circuits is an indispensable tool for development, verification, and validation of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms intended for near-term quantum co-processors. The emergence of exascale high-performance computing (HPC) platforms presents new opportunities for pushing the boundaries of quantum circuit simulation. We present a modernized version of the Tensor Network Quantum Virtual Machine (TNQVM) that serves as the quantum circuit simulation backend in the eXtreme-scale ACCelerator (XACC) framework. The new version is based on the scalable tensor network processing library ExaTN (Exascale Tensor Networks). It provides multiple configurable quantum circuit simulators that perform either an exact quantum circuit simulation via the full tensor network contraction or an approximate simulation via a suitably chosen tensor factorization scheme. Upon necessity, stochastic noise modeling from real quantum processors is incorporated into the simulations by modeling quantum channels with Kraus tensors. By combining the portable XACC quantum programming frontend and the scalable ExaTN numerical processing backend, we introduce an end-to-end virtual quantum development environment that can scale from laptops to future exascale platforms. We report initial benchmarks of our framework, which include a demonstration of the distributed execution, incorporation of quantum decoherence models, and simulation of the random quantum circuits used for the certification of quantum supremacy on Google’s Sycamore superconducting architecture.