A flexible high-performance simulator for verifying and benchmarking quantum circuits implemented on real hardware

Abstract

Here we present qFlex, a flexible tensor network based quantum circuit simulator. qFlex can compute both exact amplitudes, essential for the verification of the quantum hardware, as well as low fidelity amplitudes, in order to mimic sampling from Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. In this work, we focus on random quantum circuits (RQCs) in the range of sizes expected for supremacy experiments. Fidelity $f$ simulations are performed at a cost that is $1/f$ lower than perfect fidelity ones. We also present a technique to eliminate the overhead introduced by rejection sampling in most tensor network approaches. We benchmark the simulation of square lattices and Google's Bristlecone QPU. Our analysis is supported by extensive simulations on NASA HPC clusters Pleiades and Electra. For our most computationally demanding simulation, the two clusters combined reached a peak of 20 PFLOPS (single precision), i.e., $64\%$ of their maximum achievable performance, which represents the largest numerical computation in terms of sustained FLOPs and number of nodes utilized ever run on NASA HPC clusters. Finally, we introduce a novel multithreaded, cache-efficient tensor index permutation algorithm of general application.