Accelerating Quantum Circuit Simulation with Symbolic Execution and Loop Summarization

Quantum circuit simulation is the basic tool for reasoning over quantum programs. Despite the tremendous advance in the simulator technology in the recent years, the performance of simulators is still unsatisfactory on non-trivial circuits, which slows down the development of new quantum systems. In this work, we develop a loop summarizing simulator based on multi-terminal binary decision diagrams (MTBDDs) with efficiently customized quantum gate operations. The simulator is capable of automatic loop summarization using symbolic execution, which saves repetitive computation for circuits with iterative structures. Experimental results show the simulator outperforms state-of-the-art simulators on some standard circuits, such as Grover's algorithm, by several orders of magnitude.