Performance Evaluation of the Intel Quantum Simulator on the Lusitania Supercomputer

Nowadays, although quantum computers are a re-ality, they are still in early stages of development. The presence of noisy qubits as well as the difficulties in accessing them, make quantum computing simulators a need for the scientific community. There are several simulators available and, while each one usually list their own characteristics, there is a lack of reports about their performance on concrete systems. In this work we have executed the Intel Quantum Simulator (IQS) on the LUSITANIA supercomputer to evaluate its scalability with respect to both the number of qubits and the depth of the quantum circuits using two self-developed benchmarks. The same tests have been run on a personal computer (PC), used as a baseline. The conclusions indicate that for complex circuits with 13 qubits or more, the execution time on HPC systems is consistently lower than on a PC, achieving speedups of up to 98 %. In addition, using HPC systems allows for the simulation of circuits with a higher qubit count (up to 4 more qubits) than what is possible on a PC due to the RAM requirements. This work provides the quantum research and development community with a comprehensive analysis of the behavior of the IQS on two distinct systems.