Massively parallel quantum computer simulator, eleven years later

Understand

A revised version of the massively parallel simulator of a universal quantum computer, described in this journal eleven years ago, is used to benchmark various gate-based quantum algorithms on some of the most powerful supercomputers that exist today.

• Adaptive encoding of the wave function reduces the memory requirement by a factor of eight, making it possible to simulate universal quantum computers with up to 48 qubits on the Sunway TaihuLight and on the K computer.
• The simulator exhibits close-to-ideal weak-scaling behavior on the Sunway TaihuLight,on the K computer, on an IBM Blue Gene/Q, and on Intel Xeon based clusters, implying that the combination of parallelization and hardware can track the exponential scaling due to the increasing number of qubits.
• Results of executing simple quantum circuits and Shor's factorization algorithm on quantum computers containing up to 48 qubits are presented.