On the resource consumption of Software quantum computing simulators

Abstract

Recently, several real quantum devices have become available through the cloud. Nevertheless, they are expected to be very limited, in the near term, in the number and quality of the fundamental storage element, the qubit. Therefore, software quantum simulators are the only widely available tools to design and test quantum algorithms. However, the representation of quantum computing components in classical computers consumes a big amount of resources. This work describes how to model the main elements of quantum computing in a classical computer and depicts resource consumption using two popular quantum simulators. In the end, we discuss different approaches to overcome this problem.