Optimizing Quantum Computer Simulations With Data Compression & GPU Acceleration

Abstract: Simulating quantum computers involves high memory usage and often long execution times. For that reason the purpose of this project was to analyze whether data compression and GPU acceleration can be used to run simulations with more qubits than previously allowed. Ultimately this project sheds some light on how GPU acceleration and data compression algorithms, ZFP and FPZIP, impact the amount of qubits that are able to be simulated. The simulator tested in this project was a modified version of the Quantum Exact Simulation Toolkit (QuEST). From the results of this project it was found that data compression shows good potential in decreasing the total memory usage per qubit size. However, the use of data compression negatively impacted the execution time, but by using GPU acceleration the impact was reduced.