PIMutation: Exploring the Potential of PIM Architecture for Quantum Circuit Simulation

Quantum circuit simulations are essential for the verification of quantum algorithms on behalf of real quantum devices. However, the memory requirements for such simulations grow exponentially with the number of qubits involved in quantum programs. Moreover, a substantial number of computations in quantum circuit simulations cause low locality data accesses, as they require extensive computations across the entire table of the full state vector. These characteristics lead to significant latency and energy overheads during data transfers between the CPU and main memory. Processing-in-Memory (PIM), which integrates computational logic near DRAM banks, could present a promising solution to address these challenges. In this paper, we introduce PIMutation (PIM framework for qUanTum circuit simulATION) for achieving fast and energy-efficient quantum circuit simulation. PIMutation is the first attempt to leverage UPMEM, a publicly available PIM-integrated DIMM, to implement quantum circuit simulations. PIMutation incorporates three optimization strategies to overcome the overhead of quantum circuit simulation using the real PIM system: (i) gate merging, (ii) row swapping, and (iii) vector partitioning. Our evaluations show that PIMutation achieves an average speedup of 2.99x and 16.51x with a reduction of energy of 25.23% and 75.29% over the QuEST simulator on CPU in 16- and 32-qubit benchmarks, respectively.