Fast quantum circuit simulation using hardware accelerated general purpose libraries

Abstract: Quantum circuit simulators have a long tradition of exploiting massive hardware parallelism. Most of the times, parallelism has been supported by special purpose libraries tailored specifically for the quantum circuits. Quantum circuit simulators are integral part of quantum software stacks, which are mostly written in Python. Our focus has been on ease of use, implementation and maintainability within the Python ecosystem. We report the performance gains we obtained by using CuPy, a general purpose library (linear algebra) developed specifically for CUDA-based GPUs, to simulate quantum circuits. For supremacy circuits the speedup is around 2x, and for quantum multipliers almost 22x compared to state-of-the-art C++-based simulators.