Rajarshi Tiwari & James Nelson: Analog quantum simulation made simple: the QSE story

Analog quantum simulation made simple: the QSE story Rajarshi Tiwari & James Nelson The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is a public body hosting Ireland’s supercomputing national service and data services supporting Irish and European research across climate, weather, health and the environment. We, ICHEC’s quantum computing team, have been exploring the emerging area of quantum computing, to help better serve the ICHEC users. We engage in a range of activities with researchers in both the academia and industry to learn, organize and develop tools and training materials for quantum computing. We participate in several projects of quantum computing to explore 1. The potentials of algorithms in areas such as material science, earth observation, optimization 2. The different modalities of quantum computers, and their access mechanisms 3. The spectrum of SDKs from various providers to facilitate quantum computing in both hardware, and simulated backends. 4. Scaling quantum emulators and simulators in HPC environment. The Quantum Simulation Environment (QSE) emerged from one such project, namely the HPCQS project (https://www.hpcqs.eu/), aimed at integrating classical and quantum computing within an HPC setup. QSE is an open source (https://github.com/ICHEC/qse/) package developed at ICHEC by the quantum computing team, written purely in python. It is adapted from Atomic Simulation Environment (ASE), which is a flexible, customisable, and easy to use python package for setting up, steering, and analysing atomistic simulation. In analogue quantum computing, instead of quantum gates one has a set of quantum objects, each identified as qubits, which interact with each other, and instead of individually manipulating them, one evolves this ‘quantum system’ in time. Several quantum computing problems can be mapped into this evolution and thus serve as an alternative form of computation. Since the interaction among the qubits depends on their positions (unlike gate-based systems, where position has no meaning), there is a correspondence ASE, where one manipulates the positions of the atoms, particularly systems with periodic structure. QSE has two main python classes, Qbits and Calculator. The Qbits class encapsulates the details of the system, while the Calculator class connects to different backends which perform the type of calculation the user would want. Initial implementation supports MyQLM and Pulser backends, however the code design aims to enable multiple calculator backends. In this talk we describe how QSE serves as high level wrapper to ease the analogue computation, particularly for lattice-based systems. We are also adding tools within QSE that aren’t readily available in different backends and thus tries to bridge the gap of capability while staying backend agnostic. Talk room 2 (200 people) Sat 4:15 pm - 4:45 pm