A Framework for Integrating Quantum Simulation and High Performance Computing
Amir Shehata, Thomas Naughton, In-Saeng Suh
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of enabling scalable quantum simulations within high-performance computing environments by introducing the Quantum Framework (QFw). It provides a modular architecture featuring a Quantum Task Manager (QTM) and multiple Quantum Platform Managers (QPMs) to decouple classical and quantum workloads, and it supports diverse simulators and circuit frontends through a dynamic, resource-aware backend. A Dynamic Simulation Environment and a Frontier-based prototype demonstrate how heterogeneous simulators (e.g., TNQVM and NWQ-Sim) can be orchestrated alongside classical HPC jobs, using heuristics and distributed runtime frameworks (DEFw/PRTE) to maximize resource utilization. Evaluation with SupermarQ, Qiskit, and PennyLane shows flexible backend selection and concurrent execution, illustrating the framework’s potential to scale quantum simulations on HPC and ease the path toward real quantum hardware without code changes.
Abstract
Scientific applications are starting to explore the viability of quantum computing. This exploration typically begins with quantum simulations that can run on existing classical platforms, albeit without the performance advantages of real quantum resources. In the context of high-performance computing (HPC), the incorporation of simulation software can often take advantage of the powerful resources to help scale-up the simulation size. The configuration, installation and operation of these quantum simulation packages on HPC resources can often be rather daunting and increases friction for experimentation by scientific application developers. We describe a framework to help streamline access to quantum simulation software running on HPC resources. This includes an interface for circuit-based quantum computing tasks, as well as the necessary resource management infrastructure to make effective use of the underlying HPC resources. The primary contributions of this work include a classification of different usage models for quantum simulation in an HPC context, a review of the software architecture for our approach and a detailed description of the prototype implementation to experiment with these ideas using two different simulators (TNQVM \& NWQ-Sim). We include initial experimental results running on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) using a synthetic workload generated via the SupermarQ quantum benchmarking framework.