#Quantum – Information about Simulators on Microsoft Quantum Development Kit (Do you have 16 TB RAM?)

Hi!

Today is Microsoft Tech Summit Day in Toronto, so I will write a quick post about simulators on Microsoft Quantum Development Kit.

I’m sure you already downloaded and installed he tools to work with Q#. So you see that when we created a Q# project, we can see that we have a Q# file and another file in a standard programming language, for example, C#. The approach Microsoft has taken in this case is based on a coprocessor scheme. It is very similar to how a GPU or a FPGA works. Once a GPU is programmed, we can call that code from external environments, like a CPU.

We still don’t have access to Quantum Computers (sad emoticon here), however Microsoft Quantum Development Kit allows us to have a 1st approach, by using simulators to work with Q#. There are two classes in [Microsoft.Quantum. Simulation.Simulators] which allow us to run simulators.

In this scenarios we can work with a finite number of Qubits. The main restriction we have on the amount of Qubits is given by the Hardware characteristics of our development machine.

Let’s do some numbers. To simulate 30 Qubits, we need 16 GB of RAM. However, if we want to add a new single Qubit, I mean work with 31 Qubits, we have to duplicate the RAM: 32 GB of RAM. If we move to the order of 40 Qubits, we have to think about 16 of RAM. That’s why, One of the simulator’s options is to use Azure’s ability for simulations that require 40 Qubits or more.

Finally, I have to comment that, Q# allows us to have a high level of abstraction to work with Quantum Computing models. And, while at this time we use simulators for the execution of the Q# algorithms, in the near future we will be able to execute these algorithms directly in a Quantum Computer.

Happy QCoding!

Greetings @ Microsoft Tech Summit

El Bruno

References

• Microsoft Quantum Development Kit
• Microsoft Quantum Development Kit Download
• Microsoft Quantum, Writing a Quantum Program
• Microsoft Quantum, Classical Drivers and Machines
• El Bruno, Hello QWorld using Microsoft #Quantum Development Kit (fix to build the project) [Updated]
• El Bruno, More information about the Microsoft bet in Quantum Computing
• El Bruno, Quantum Computing, let’s add this one to Artificial Intelligence and Mixed Reality!

Images

• Microsoft Quantum
• Wave Function