Getting to nurture an emerging technology, NVIDIA is collaborating with Google Quantum AI, IBM and others to take quantum computing to the next level.
Quantum computing; It offers the promise of solving previously unsolvable problems in fields such as drug development, climate research, machine learning and finance. The potential is great, but the challenges are just as high.
NVIDIA, the new partner of quantum computing
Today’s quantum computers may be too small and error-prone to solve useful problems. However, it is not yet clear which quantum algorithms will offer advantages over today’s classical computers.
Wanting to help advance research in quantum computing, NVIDIA announced the cuQuantum software development kit at GTC 2021 to accelerate simulations of quantum computers in classical systems.
Simulations help researchers rapidly design and test new quantum algorithms at a scale and performance not possible with current quantum hardware. They’re also critical to helping validate and compare next-generation quantum hardware. Starting today, cuQuantum’s first library is in public beta and available for download, NVIDIA announced today.
This application, called cuStateVec, acts as an accelerator for the state vector simulation method. This approach monitors the full state of the system in memory and can scale to tens of qubits.
A second library, cuTensorNet, coming in December, will be an accelerator using the tensor network method. It will be able to handle up to thousands of qubits in some promising short-term algorithms.
Available in Leading Frameworks
It has also integrated cuStateVec into qsim, Google Quantum AI’s state vector simulator, available through Cirq, an open source framework for programming quantum computers. Users can download cuQuantum and start using Cirq wherever they use it, starting today.
On the NVIDIA side, a DGX quantum device is being built by putting it in a container optimized to run on NVIDIA DGX A100 systems with simulation software to help developers get started.
It includes Google Quantum AI’s Cirq framework and qsim simulator, along with cuQuantum and NVIDIA HPC SDK. The software will be available in the NGC catalog early next year.