GPU-Accelerated Quantum Simulation of Stabilizer Circuits
quant-ph
Submitted: 2026-03-15
Updated: 2026-09-23
Journal ref: Quantum 10, 2225 (2026)
DOI: 10.22331/q-2026-10-01-2225
Code: https://github.com/System-VerificationLab/QuaSARQ
Project page: https://nvidia.github.io/cccl/cub/device_wide.html#device-module
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We introduce new parallel algorithms for efficiently simulating stabilizer (Clifford) circuits on GPUs, with a focus on data-parallel tableau evolution and scalable handling of projective
Terminology
Abstract
We introduce new parallel algorithms for efficiently simulating stabilizer (Clifford) circuits on GPUs, with a focus on data-parallel tableau evolution and scalable handling of projective measurements. Our approach reformulates key bottlenecks in stabilizer simulation -- such as Gaussian elimination and measurement updates -- into GPU-tailored primitives that eliminate sequential dependencies and maximize memory coalescing. We implement these techniques in QuaSARQ, a GPU-accelerated stabilizer simulator designed for large qubit counts and many-shot sampling. Across a broad benchmark suite reaching 180,000 qubits and depth 1,000 (roughly 130M gates), QuaSARQ shows substantial runtime improvements, with up to 105 times speedup, and over 80% energy reduction on demanding instances. Moreover, QuaSARQ consistently outperforms Stim, a state-of-the-art CPU-optimized stabilizer simulator, as well as Qiskit-Aer (CPU/GPU), Qibo, Cirq, and PennyLane. Finally, QuaSARQ exhibits a significant advantage in many-shot sampling on large workloads. These results demonstrate that our parallel algorithms can significantly advance the scalability of stabilizer-circuit simulation, particularly for workloads involving extensive measurements and sampling.
Sources
- An introduction to measurement based quantum computation
- Quantum computing with Qiskit
- PennyLane: Automatic differentiation of hybrid quantum-classical computations
- The Heisenberg Representation of Quantum Computers
- PACOX: A FPGA-based Pauli Composer Accelerator for Pauli String Computation
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