Minimizing Communications of Quantum Circuit Simulations on Distributed Systems

Efficient full-state quantum circuit simulations are useful tools for the design of quantum algorithms. Multi-node distributed systems are commonly employed as such simulations require a large amount of computation power and memory space. In distributed systems, communication overhead can be the performance bottleneck. This paper presents a distributed simulation framework called QuanTrans. A quantum circuit is composed of many levels of quantum gates. The simulation is conducted level by level. For circuits with particular structures, it employs a hybrid simulation approach to replace intermediate multi-level communications with one level of final merge operation, whose communication volume is comparable to that of one level of simulation in previous work. A circuit without such structures is sliced to find applicable sub-circuits with a single or multiple consecutive level(s). One level of communication is required for each sub-circuit, so we further propose a polynomial-time optimal circuit slicing algorithm. It can transform any circuit such that the number of sliced sub-circuits is the minimum after transformation. Experimental results show that QuanTrans can effectively reduce communication time and simulation time.