Quantum Simulators
The abilities of quantum computers are rapidly evolving, with applications such as:
- Simulating quantum systems (e.g., protein folding, molecular dynamics, chemical studies, material science, etc.)
- Optimization problems (e.g., traveling salesman, maximum cut, Grover’s search, etc.)
- Cryptography (e.g., network security)
- Machine learning (e.g., classifiers, anomaly detection)
Quantum simulators are used to understand the capabilities of diverse quantum computers. Quantum simulators help us understand the logic behind quantum computing with various applications and how to operate and integrate them into our skill set. Many quantum computing simulations exhibit exponential scaling, which can quickly become computationally intensive. This means the computational time can drastically change (e.g., from 1 second to 1 hour) with a small increase in the qubit number (e.g., 10).
List of Quantum Simulators
The quantum simulators can be used to test your own digital quantum circuits, quantum annealing process, or exact quantum evolution on our HPC systems. Each simulator has advantages, making it possible to choose the best simulator for your task.
All simulators are provided as containers, which can be accessed via the corresponding profile ID. Any system account, as applied for and instructed in Getting an account, has access to the simulator containers. Users can then choose to access the simulators either via JupyterHPC or the terminal via SSH (login). Each simulator container also comes with common packages such as SciPy, NumPy, matplotlib, Pandas, etc.
Simulator | Use-case | Level | Profile IDs | Container path |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| qibo | Noisy qubit circuit simulations with support for tensor networks and GPU/CPU backends (TensorFlow/CuPy), high-level abstractions, hybrid quantum-classical workflows. | Beginner | quics-qibo-cpu , quics-qibo-gpu | /sw/container/quantum-computing/qibo-cpu/qibo-cpu.sif,/sw/container/quantum-computing/qibo-gpu/qibo-gpu.sif |
| qiskit (IBM) | Realistic qubit circuit simulations with CUDA GPU acceleration, and support for variational algorithms | Intermediate | quics-qiskit-cpu, quics-qiskit-gpu | /sw/container/quantum-computing/qiskit-cpu/qiskit-cpu-v2.0.0.sif,/sw/container/quantum-computing/qiskit-gpu/qiskit-gpu.sif |
| qsimcirq (Google) | Realistic qubit circuit simulations with multi-threading, GPU and tensor network support. | Intermediate | quics-qsim_circ-gpu | /sw/container/quantum-computing/qsim/qsim.sif |
| qulacs (QunaSys) | Noisy qubit circuit simulations with CPU/GPU acceleration, fast gate operations, flexible circuit optimization, and support for Python and C++ | Expert | quics-qulacs-cpu, quics-qulacs-gpu | /sw/container/quantum-computing/qulacs-cpu/qulacs-cpu.sif,/sw/container/quantum-computing/qulacs-gpu/qulacs-gpu-v0.6.11.sif |
| openfermion (Google) | Realistic fermionic circuit simulations for quantum chemistry and materials science. | Expert | quics-openfermion-cpu | /sw/container/quantum-computing/openfermion/openfermion.sif |
| qutip | Lindblad dynamics of open quantum systems | Expert | quics-qutip-cpu | /sw/container/quantum-computing/qutip/qutip.sif |
| dwave | Quantum annealing simulations with support for QUBO problems and GPU/CPU backends, high-level abstractions, and hybrid quantum-classical workflows. | Expert | quics-dwave-cpu | /sw/container/quantum-computing/dwave/dwave.sif |
Starting your simulator on Jupyter.HPC
- Log in at jupyter.hpc.gwdg.de with your AcademicCloud account
- Right below
Server OptionsclickProfilesand insert the Profile ID corresponding to your simulator of choice - Press start to spawn your server
Starting your simulator via the terminal
The standard software to run containers on our clusters is the Apptainer software. Start by (logging-in) via SSH. Next, run your code using a particular simulator simply by executing the following commands:
module load apptainer
apptainer exec --bind $WORK,$TMPDIR <CONTAINER_PATH>
python <YOUR_FILE_PATH>Please refer to the Apptainer page in our documentation for further instructions on how to use Apptainer.
Further Information
For an overview of our approach to quantum computing, refer to our user group page Quantum Computing or the QUICS project webpage.
Please refer to the FAQ page, or for more.
Contacts
Feel free to discuss more on our Matrix channel or contact us directly with specific questions support@gwdg.de.