Fujitsu claims ‘major technical milestone’ in quantum simulation

(TheRegister) Dan Robinson, an experienced IT writer, provides information on Fujitsu’s latest announcement about its a new quantum simulator capable. Inside Technology shares below:
Fujitsu says it has developed the world’s fastest quantum simulator capable of handling 36 qubit quantum circuits. The firm will use this to speed development of quantum applications, and said it is already planning a further simulator capable of handling more qubits.
The unnamed simulator was built using a 64-node cluster of PRIMEHPC FX 700 boxen, which run Fujitsu’s own A64FX 64-bit Arm chip – the same processor as used in its Fugaku supercomputer that was itself ranked as the fastest in the world.
Each PRIMEHPC FX700 node has a 48-core A64FX Arm chip and 32GB of high-bandwidth HBM2 memory stacked directly on top of the CPU, and the nodes are interconnected using an InfiniBand EDR / HDR100 fabric.
According to Fujitsu, this system can achieve approximately double the performance of other quantum simulators in 36 qubit operations when running the Qulacs quantum simulator software. Qulacs was developed by Osaka University and quantum developer QunaSys Corporation for fast simulation of large quantum circuits, and is available under the MIT licence from GitHub.

Sandra K. Helsel, Ph.D. has been researching and reporting on frontier technologies since 1990.  She has her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.