Simulation of Quantum Computations: Passing through the Bottleneck by Dedicated Decision Diagrams

Quantum computing is getting real. Nevertheless, corresponding quantum applications still need to be evaluated on conventional machines – requiring powerful and efficient simulation engines. Thus far, all state-of-the-art solutions are limited to a small number of qubits only and require days or even weeks to conduct the desired simulations – even if super-computers with petabytes of distributed memory and thousands of compute nodes are employed. Here, we are proposing an alternative approach which aims for passing this bottleneck by dedicated decision diagrams. A preliminary implementation of the proposed idea already showed that this allows to simulate several applications in minutes rather than days/weeks on a simple desktop machine. Within this project, we are now aiming to lift these basic research results to the application level.