Fujitsu said it has successfully developed the world’s fastest quantum computer simulator capable of handling 36 qubit quantum circuits on a cluster system featuring the company’s Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX 700.
PRIMEHPC FX 700 is equipped with the same A64FX CPU that powers “Fugaku,” the world’s fastest supercomputer.
The newly developed quantum simulator can execute the quantum simulator software “Qulacs” in parallel at high speed, achieving approximately double the performance of other significant quantum simulators in 36 qubit quantum operations.
Qulacs, one of the world’s fastest quantum simulator software developed by Osaka University and QunaSys, and the performance of memory bandwidth was maximised by executing multiple calculations simultaneously using SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) instructions when ported to the A64FX.
Fujitsu’s new quantum simulator will serve as an important bridge towards the development of quantum computing applications that are expected to be put to practical use in the years ahead.
Based on this breakthrough, Fujitsu and Fujifilm have started joint research on quantum computing applications in the field of materials science.
“Quantum computers have the potential to perform highly accurate calculations in the computational chemistry field, which cannot be performed by classical computers,” said Yukihiro Okuno, senior researcher at Fujifilm’s Analysis Technology Center.
Moving forward, Fujitsu will accelerate its efforts to develop quantum computers with the aim of developing a 40 qubit simulator by September 2022, and conduct joint research and development of quantum applications with customers in fields including finance and drug discovery.
“We stand now at the edge of a new age in computing technology,” said Fujitsu CTO Vivek Mahajan. “Moving forward, we aim to leverage this new quantum simulator for our customers to accelerate the development of quantum applications and ultimately contribute to a sustainable world by solving a range of issues facing society.”
Fujitsu has further developed a new method to efficiently rearrange the qubit states deployed in the distributed memory on the cluster according to the progress of the quantum circuit and its calculation that helps to reduce communication costs.
The new system is also compatible with other quantum simulator software besides Qulacs.
Qiskit, one of the major development tools for quantum computer software, is available for Fujitsu’s quantum simulator and promises quantum software developers a highly convenient development environment.
Collaborating with QunaSys, Fujitsu plans to provide the company’s quantum chemical calculation software Qamuy on the new quantum simulator to provide the resources to execute a wide variety of high-speed quantum chemical calculations.
