The Quantum Exact Simulation Toolkit is a high performance simulator of quantum circuits, state-vectors and density matrices. QuEST uses multithreading, GPU acceleration and distribution to run lightning first on laptops, desktops and networked supercomputers. QuEST just works; it is stand-alone, requires no installation, and is trivial to compile and run. QuEST hybridises OpenMP and MPI with huge compiler support to run on all sorts of multicore, multi-CPU and distributed hardware, uses HIP to run on AMD GPUs, integrates cuQuantum and Thrust for cutting-edge performance on modern NVIDIA GPUs, and has a custom kernel backend to run on older CUDA-compatible GPUs. And it hides these deployment modes behind a single, seamless interface.
QuEST is developed by the QTechTheory group at the University of Oxford, and these authors. To learn more:
QuEST has a simple interface, which is agnostic to its runtime environment, between CPUs, GPUs and over networks.
hadamard(qubits, 0);
controlledRotateX(qubits, 0, 1, angle);
double prob = calcProbOfOutcome(qubits, 0, outcome);
Yet, it is flexible
Vector v;
v.x = 1; v.y = .5; v.z = 0;
rotateAroundAxis(qubits, 0, angle, v);
ComplexMatrix2 u = {
.real = {{.5, .5}, { .5,.5}},
.imag = {{.5,-.5}, {-.5,.5}}};
unitary(qubits, 0, u);
mixDepolarising(qubits, 0, prob);
and extremely powerful
ComplexMatrixN u = createComplexMatrixN(5);
int ctrls[] = {0, 1, 2};
int targs[] = {5, 20, 15, 10, 25};
multiControlledMultiQubitUnitary(qubits, ctrls, 3, targs, 5, u);
ComplexMatrixN k1, k2, k3 = ...
mixMultiQubitKrausMap(qubits, targs, 5, {k1, k2, k3}, 3);
double val = calcExpecPauliHamil(qubits, hamiltonian, workspace);
applyTrotterCircuit(qubits, hamiltonian, time, order, repetitions);
QuEST supports:
qreal
numerical type which can use single, double or quad precision For developers: QuEST's doc is automatically regenerated when the
master
branch is updated via Github Actions. To locally regenerate the doc, rundoxygen doxyconfig/config
in the root directory, which generates html documentation inDoxygen_doc/html
.
To rocket right in, download QuEST with git at the terminal
git clone https://github.com/quest-kit/QuEST.git
cd QuEST
Compile the tutorial example (source) using cmake and make
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
then run it with
./demo
Windows users should install Build Tools for Visual Studio, and CMake, and run the above commmands in the Developer Command Prompt for VS, though using build commands
cmake .. -G "NMake Makefiles" nmake
If using MSVC and NMake in this way fails, users can forego GPU acceleration, download MinGW-w64, and compile via
cmake .. -G "MinGW Makefiles" make
We sincerely thank the following external contributors to QuEST.
mixDamping
on CPU.initDiagonalOpFromPauliHamil
.QuEST uses the mt19937ar Mersenne Twister algorithm for random number generation, under the BSD licence. QuEST optionally (by additionally importing QuEST_complex.h
) integrates the language agnostic complex type by Randy Meyers and Dr. Thomas Plum
QuESTlink
a Mathematica package enabling symbolic circuit manipulation, analytic simulation, visualisation and high performance simulation with remote accelerated hardware.
pyQuEST
a python interface to QuEST, based on Cython, developed within the QTechTheory group. Please note, pyQuEST is currently in the alpha stage.
PyQuEST-cffi
a python interface to QuEST based on cffi developed by HQS Quantum Simulations. Please note, PyQuEST-cffi is currently in the alpha stage and not an official QuEST project.