The renowned chip company, NVIDIA has announced that they are collaborating with Google Quantum AI, IBM and others to take quantum computing to the next level. At the GTC 2021, the company also announced the cuQuantum software development kit built to assist in quantum computing research by speeding up the simulation of quantum computers on classical systems.
Quantum computing is very promising and has the potential of being useful in performing complex problems that will unlock major developments in today’s world. The launch of the cuQuantum software by NVIDIA is an attempt to address the challenges faced in developing quantum computing algorithms that are capable of solving complex problems in areas like drug development, climate research, machine learning, and finance.
Simulations are rapid means of designing and testing new quantum algorithms at a scale and performance that is ordinarily not possible with current quantum hardware. Simulations help researchers to envision, validate and benchmark the next generation of quantum software
With the launch of cuStateVec – the first cuQuantum library which is available for download in public beta, quantum simulations will be accelerated and quantum research will be improved. cuStateVec is an accelerator for the state vector simulation method. It uses the approach of tracking the full state of the system in memory and can scale to tens of qubits.
“Quantum computing promises to solve tough challenges in computing that are beyond the reach of traditional systems,”
Catherine Vollgraff Heidwei at Google Quantum AI.
NVIDIA will also be launching a second library in December which will be known as cuTensorNet. cuTensorNet is an accelerator that uses the tensor network method. It is capable of handling thousands of qubits on some promising near quantum algorithms.
Available on Leading Frameworks
With NVIDIAO’s integration of cuStateVec into qsim, users can download cuQuantum and use it wherever they use Cirq. qsim is Google Quantum AI’s state vector simulator that can be used through Cirq. Cirq is an open-source framework for programming quantum computers.
Additionally, NVIDIA announced that another cuQuantum integration is expected to happen by December. cuStateVec will be integrated with Qiskit Aer and will be ready for use at the set date. Qiskit Aer is a high-performance simulator framework for quantum circuits from IBM.
“This high-performance simulation stack will accelerate the work of researchers around the world who are developing algorithms and applications for quantum computers.”
Catherine Vollgraff Heidweiller at Google Quantum AI.
Big Community Behind cuQuantum
Research institutes such as Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, National labs including Oak Ridge, university research groups at Caltech, Oxford and MIT, and companies including IonQ have adopted the cuQuantum SDK and are integrating it into their workflows
Pasqal, a Paris-based quantum computing startup that is also conducting research on quantum computing have purchased an NVIDIA DGX POD to perform massive simulations with cuQuantum. This will help in accelerating the discovery of innovative solutions to drug design and mobility problems
“The ability to perform powerful, large-scale simulations of quantum systems is vital to our work,”
Loic Henriet, CTO at Pasqal.
Plug Into Quantum Simulations
NVIDIA is helping developers kickstart by putting their simulation software in a container optimized to run on the NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, creating a DGX quantum appliance. This includes the Google Quantum AI’s Cirq framework and qsim simulator, along with cuQuantum and the NVIDIA HPC SDK. The software will be available early next year on the NGC catalog.
By using appliance software such as Shor’s algorithm, random quantum circuits and the variational quantum eigensolver, NVIDIA has shown an exceptional performance in solving quantum computing problems.
“The combination of cuQuantum software with DGX A100 hardware will dramatically accelerate our progress.”
Loic Henriet, CTO at Pasqal.