QuantumSim: A memory efficient simulator for quantum computing

Abstract

Classical computing has been evolving, to help solve harder problems. Following Moore’s Law the miniaturisation of transistors has helped improve performance. However, this has led to a ”Power Wall”. The clock frequency of processors have not been making the leaps predicted by Moore’s law. This is simply because the power dissipation becomes too high after a certain frequency. This, along with a few other factors, led the industry to move to multi-core processors and continue to homogeneous multi-core systems, multiple cores that are identical to each other, and heterogeneous, multiple cores that are not identical to each other. To further improve performance of computing systems, hardware accelerators were introduced. The one we are all familiar with is the GPU (graphics processing unit). As the name suggests it is an accelerator to process graphics. It is used extensively for image processing and is much faster at doing this than a CPU. There are many more types of hardware accelerators that offers high speedups for certain applications. Quantum accelerators are one such example. There are a certain class of problems that cannot be solved, or rather will take too long to solve on a classical computer, such that it is practically infeasible. One such problem is prime-factorisation problem.