General-Purpose Parallel Simulator for Quantum Computing

With current technologies, it seems to be very difficult to implement quantum computers with many qubits. It is therefore of importance to simulate quantum algorithms and circuits on the existing computers. However, for a large-size problem, the simulation often requires more computational power than is available from sequential processing. Therefore, the simulation methods using parallel processing are required. We have developed a general-purpose simulator for quantum computing on the parallel computer (Sun, Enterprise4500). It can deal with up-to 30 qubits. We have performed Shor’s factorization and Grover’s database search by using the simulator, and we analyzed robustness of the corresponding quantum circuits in the presence of decoherence and operational errors. The corresponding results, statistics and analyses are presented. key words : quantum computer simulator, Shor’s factorization, Grover’s database search, parallel processing, decoherence and operational errors