HybridQ: A Hybrid Simulator for Quantum Circuits

Developing state-of-the-art classical simulators of quantum circuits is of utmost importance to test and evaluate early quantum technology and understand the true potential of full-blown error-corrected quantum computers. In the past few years, multiple theoretical and numerical advances have continuously pushed the boundary of what is classically simulable, hence the development of a plethora of tools which are often limited to a specific purpose or designed for a particular hardware (e.g. CPUs vs. GPUs). Moreover, such tools are typically developed using tailored languages and syntax, which makes it hard to compare results from, and create hybrid approaches using, different simulation techniques. To support unified and optimized use of these techniques across platforms, we developed HybridQ , a highly extensible platform designed to provide a common framework to integrate multiple state-of-the-art techniques to run on a variety of hardware. The philosophy behind its development has been driven by three main pillars: Easy to Use, Easy to Extend, and Use the Best Available Technology. The powerful tools of HybridQ allow users to manipulate, develop, and extend noiseless and noisy circuits for different hardware architectures. HybridQ supports large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) simulations, automatically balancing workload among different processor nodes and enabling the use of multiple backends to maximize parallel efficiency. Everything is then glued together by a simple and expressive language that allows seamless switching from one technique to another as well as from one hardware to the next, without the need to write lengthy translations, thus greatly simplifying the development of new hybrid algorithms and techniques.

开发最先进的量子电路经典模拟器对于测试和评估早期量子技术以及理解完全纠错的量子计算机的真正潜力至关重要。在过去几年中，多项理论和数值方面的进展不断拓展了经典可模拟的边界，因此开发了大量工具，这些工具往往局限于特定目的或为特定硬件（例如CPU与GPU）而设计。此外，此类工具通常使用定制的语言和语法开发，这使得很难比较不同模拟技术的结果以及创建使用不同模拟技术的混合方法。为了支持在不同平台上统一和优化使用这些技术，我们开发了HybridQ，这是一个高度可扩展的平台，旨在提供一个通用框架，以集成多种最先进的技术，使其能够在各种硬件上运行。其开发背后的理念由三个主要支柱驱动：易于使用、易于扩展以及使用最佳可用技术。HybridQ的强大工具允许用户针对不同的硬件架构操作、开发和扩展无噪声和有噪声的电路。HybridQ支持大规模高性能计算（HPC）模拟，自动在不同处理器节点之间平衡工作负载，并能够使用多个后端以最大限度地提高并行效率。然后，通过一种简单且富有表现力的语言将所有内容整合在一起，该语言允许从一种技术无缝切换到另一种技术，以及从一种硬件切换到另一种硬件，而无需编写冗长的转换代码，从而极大地简化了新的混合算法和技术的开发。