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Abstract:

<p>Quantum Computing lies at the frontier of computing, offering a radically different and unconventional model of computation. In the absence of practical quantum computers today, we must simulate their execution. This creates a performance problem, as quantum computing simulation is very costly. However, quantum computing simulation does contain an abundance of parallelism. The research question becomes: how to expose this parallelism? Although it is easy to show the problem inherently contains a large amount of parallelism, the type of parallelism is non-trivial to exploit in a scalable way using current mainstream parallelization techniques. This paper presents the formulation a virtual machine for quantum computing as a finegrained dataflow schema, which aims to expose and exploit the abundance of parallelism in a way that avoids the observed scalability issues. We present the formal mapping from the linear algebra description of elementary quantum operations to dataflow graphs, analyze its theoretical parallel characteristics and present experimental performance results of a prototype implementation.</p>