QPUs and GPUs: Practical Applications of NVIDIA Accelerators to Emulate and Co-process with Emerging Quantum Computers

There's broad and sustained scientific, engineering, and business interest in the emerging potential of quantum computing. An open and crucial question is how to profitably mix high-performance classical computing with quantum computing. We discuss several vignettes implemented at QC Ware related to the two core themes of (1) using NVIDIA GPUs to emulate perfect and/or noisy quantum computers to prototype quantum algorithms in the present, before the widespread proliferation of strong quantum hardware resources, and (2) using NVIDIA GPUs to perform critical pre- and post-processing tasks around the quantum circuit algorithms in the potential future of hybrid quantum/classical approaches. We'll emphasize the algorithm-specific customization made possible by the ease of implementing performant CUDA code — this allows for highly specialized GPU implementation of quantum circuit simulator and widespread deployment of GPU-accelerated co-processing code.