Low-Level and NUMA-Aware Optimization for High-Performance Quantum Simulation

Abstract

Scalable classical simulation of quantum circuits is crucial for advancing quantum algorithm development and validating emerging hardware. This work focuses on performance enhancements through targeted low-level and NUMA-aware tuning on a single-node system, thereby not only advancing the efficiency of classical quantum simulations but also establishing a foundation for scalable, heterogeneous implementations that bridge toward noiseless quantum computing. Although few prior studies have reported similar hardware-level optimizations, such implementations have not been released as open-source software, limiting independent validation and further development. We introduce an open-source, high-performance extension to the QuEST state vector simulator that integrates state-of-the-art low-level and NUMA-aware optimizations for modern processors. Our approach emphasizes locality-aware computation and incorporates hardware-specific techniques including NUMA-aware memory allocation, thread pinning, AVX-512 vectorization, aggressive loop unrolling, and explicit memory prefetching. Experiments demonstrate substantial speedups--5.5-6.5x for single-qubit gate operations, 4.5x for two-qubit gates, 4x for Random Quantum Circuits (RQC), and 1.8x for the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT). Algorithmic workloads further achieve 4.3-4.6x acceleration for Grover and 2.5x for Shor-like circuits. These results show that systematic, architecture-aware tuning can significantly extend the practical simulation capacity of classical quantum simulators on current hardware.