Comparing performance of variational quantum algorithm simulations on HPC systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: De Pascale, Marco, Bauer, Tobias Valentin, Gambo, Yaknan John, Vera, Mario Hernández, Huber, Stefan, Mete, Burak, Jamadagni, Amit, Bentellis, Amine, Oliv, Marita, Iapichino, Luigi, Lorenz, Jeanette Miriam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author De Pascale, Marco
Bauer, Tobias Valentin
Gambo, Yaknan John
Vera, Mario Hernández
Huber, Stefan
Mete, Burak
Jamadagni, Amit
Bentellis, Amine
Oliv, Marita
Iapichino, Luigi
Lorenz, Jeanette Miriam
author_facet De Pascale, Marco
Bauer, Tobias Valentin
Gambo, Yaknan John
Vera, Mario Hernández
Huber, Stefan
Mete, Burak
Jamadagni, Amit
Bentellis, Amine
Oliv, Marita
Iapichino, Luigi
Lorenz, Jeanette Miriam
contents Variational quantum algorithms are of special importance in the research on quantum computing applications because of their applicability to current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. The main building blocks of these algorithms (among them, the definition of the Hamiltonian and of the ansatz, the optimizer) define a relatively large parameter space, making the comparison of results and performance between different approaches and software simulators cumbersome and prone to errors. In this paper, we employ a generic description of the problem, in terms of both Hamiltonian and ansatz, to port a problem definition consistently among different simulators. Three use cases of relevance for current quantum hardware (ground state calculation for the Hydrogen molecule, MaxCut, Travelling Salesman Problem) have been run on a set of HPC systems and software simulators to study the dependence of performance on the runtime environment, the scalability of the simulation codes and the mutual agreement of the physical results, respectively. The results show that our toolchain can successfully translate a problem definition between different simulators. On the other hand, variational algorithms are limited in their scaling by the long runtimes with respect to their memory footprint, so they expose limited parallelism to computation. This shortcoming is partially mitigated by using techniques like job arrays. The potential of the parser tool for exploring HPC performance and comparisons of results of variational algorithm simulations is highlighted.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_17614
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Comparing performance of variational quantum algorithm simulations on HPC systems
De Pascale, Marco
Bauer, Tobias Valentin
Gambo, Yaknan John
Vera, Mario Hernández
Huber, Stefan
Mete, Burak
Jamadagni, Amit
Bentellis, Amine
Oliv, Marita
Iapichino, Luigi
Lorenz, Jeanette Miriam
Quantum Physics
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Variational quantum algorithms are of special importance in the research on quantum computing applications because of their applicability to current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. The main building blocks of these algorithms (among them, the definition of the Hamiltonian and of the ansatz, the optimizer) define a relatively large parameter space, making the comparison of results and performance between different approaches and software simulators cumbersome and prone to errors. In this paper, we employ a generic description of the problem, in terms of both Hamiltonian and ansatz, to port a problem definition consistently among different simulators. Three use cases of relevance for current quantum hardware (ground state calculation for the Hydrogen molecule, MaxCut, Travelling Salesman Problem) have been run on a set of HPC systems and software simulators to study the dependence of performance on the runtime environment, the scalability of the simulation codes and the mutual agreement of the physical results, respectively. The results show that our toolchain can successfully translate a problem definition between different simulators. On the other hand, variational algorithms are limited in their scaling by the long runtimes with respect to their memory footprint, so they expose limited parallelism to computation. This shortcoming is partially mitigated by using techniques like job arrays. The potential of the parser tool for exploring HPC performance and comparisons of results of variational algorithm simulations is highlighted.
title Comparing performance of variational quantum algorithm simulations on HPC systems
topic Quantum Physics
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17614