Nvidia Launches cuQuantumSDK for Simulating Quantum Circuits; Dips Toe in Quantum Computing

(HPC.Wire) Nvidia officially dipped a toe into quantum computing with the launch of cuQuantum SDK, a development platform for simulating quantum circuits on GPU-accelerated systems. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized Nvidia doesn’t plan to build quantum computers, but thinks GPU-accelerated platforms are the best systems for quantum circuit and algorithm development and testing.
Nvidia collaborated with Caltech to develop “a state-of-the-art quantum circuit simulator with cuQuantum running on NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. It generated a sample from a full-circuit simulation of the Google Sycamore circuit in 9.3 minutes on Selene, a task that 18 months ago experts thought would take days using millions of CPU cores.”
Think of cuQuantum, says Nvidia, as CUDA for quantum computing. The SDK consists of “optimized libraries and tools for accelerating quantum computing workflows. Developers can use cuQuantum to speed up quantum circuit simulations based on state vector, density matrix, and tensor network methods by orders of magnitude.”