Nvidia Cuquantum And Xanadu Pennylane Enable Supercomputer Quantum Simulation

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are using the latest version of PennyLane, a quantum programming framework from Toronto-based Xanadu, to run quantum computing simulations on a supercomputer for the first time. The open-source software, which builds on the NVIDIA cuQuantum software development kit, lets simulations run on high-performance clusters of NVIDIA GPUs. They are using 256 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs on Perlmutter to simulate about three dozen qubits. Quantum simulation is being used to solve problems in high-energy physics, machine learning, chemistry and materials science. New techniques have been used to show that circuits in the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) with p entangling layers can be simulated by circuits on a fraction of the original number of qubits.