Amazon Web Services announced that Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs, a feature the company announced last year to allow the Braket quantum cloud service support hybrid classical-quantum workloads, now supports five high-performance embedded circuit simulators, available in the same container as a user’s application code.
As part of this launch, we support the high-performance lightning.qubit and lightning.gpu simulators from Xanadu’s PennyLane, the latter of which is powered by the Nvidia cuQuantum SDK, according to an AWS blog post. These methods have significantly lower memory usage and can reduce the number of circuit executions required for your variational algorithm to converge by as much as 90%.
That solves a fundamental challenge with current quantum circuit simulators; as researchers explore more advanced algorithms that require hundreds of thousands of circuit iterations to achieve desired performance, algorithm runtimes can often stretch to hours. Fewer circuit executions mean fewer round-trips between a user’s algorithm code and the simulator, hence faster runtimes, according to the post.
This announcement comes after Nvidia in March released cuQuantum, a set of libraries for accelerating quantum circuit simulations on Nvidia Tensor Core GPUs, and in collaboration with Xanadu, announced a new GPU-accelerated simulator for PennyLane.
More details about this latest announcement can be found here.
Speakers from Amazon Braket and Nvidia will participate in separate sessions at next week’s IQT event in San Diego.
Dan has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.