Full State Quantum Circuit Simulation Beyond Memory Limit

Quantum circuit simulation (QCS) is essential in the noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) era when real quantum computers are scarce. However, fully tracking the states of a quantum system in QCS is highly challenging due to the exponential memory growth that significantly limits the computational reach of classical systems for QCS. Though it is straightforward to leverage secondary storage to extend the scale of QCS, excessive data movement between memory and storage dominates the simulation time, making this solution unrealistic. To tackle this challenge, we identify an intrinsic property of QCS and implement an open-source framework to effectively reduce data movement by >116x. We evaluate the framework on various benchmarks and demonstrate 4x memory reduction with only <20% overhead. On a memory constrained system, we show that it extends the scale of QCS to 32 qubits (64 GB memory requirement) while existing simulators are bounded to 28 qubits (4 GB memory requirement). Our implementation can be accessed via https://github.com/Zhaoyilunnn/qdao.