UniQ: A Unified Programming Model for Efficient Quantum Circuit Simulation

Quantum circuit simulation is critical for verifying quantum computers. Given exponential complexity in the simulation, existing simulators use different architectures to accelerate the simulation. However, due to the variety of both simulation methods and modern architectures, it is challenging to design a high-performance yet portable simulator. In this work, we propose UniQ, a unified programming model for multiple simulation methods on various hardware architectures. We provide a unified application abstraction to describe different applications, and a unified hierarchical hardware abstraction upon different hardware. Based on these abstractions, UniQ can perform various circuit transformations without being aware of either concrete application or architecture detail, and generate high-performance execution schedules on different platforms without much human effort. Evaluations on CPU, GPU, and Sunway platforms show that UniQ can accelerate quantum circuit simulation by up to 28.59× (4.47× on average) over state-of-the-art frameworks, and successfully scale to 399,360 cores on 1,024 nodes.