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arXiv · 2607.09882

Benchmarking Zero-Setup Quantum Circuit Simulators

Arul Rhik Mazumder·Hovnatan Karapetyan·Mohammed Zuhair Mullath·Rudy H. Tanin·Hrant Gharibyan·Hayk Tepanyan
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Abstract

Practitioners increasingly rely on hosted simulation environments, but their performance characteristics remain poorly documented. We present a systematic benchmarking study of GPU-accelerated approximate quantum simulation across two widely used methods: matrix product states (MPS) and Pauli path simulation (PPS), comparing BlueQubit (a hosted tool that handles hardware provisioning, simulator configuration, and job orchestration) against AWS Braket, Quantum Rings, Qiskit pauli-prop, and PauliPropagation (written in Julia). For MPS, we find that GPU runtime yields sub-quadratic scaling with bond dimension, with a growing advantage over CPU at increasing scale. For Pauli path simulation on IBM's 127-qubit kicked Ising benchmark, GPUs deliver up to ${\sim}1{,}700\times$ speedup at fine truncation thresholds ($δ= 2.5 \times 10^{-5}$, 27.6M Pauli terms), and are the only backends that reach accuracy regimes below $δ= 10^{-5}$, which remained inaccessible to the commodity CPU-based implementations and self-contained SDKs evaluated here. We also provide a reproducible characterization of these simulators across regimes, including tradeoffs that isolated evaluations do not show. All benchmarking code and configurations are in a public GitHub repository.

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Arul Rhik Mazumder, Hovnatan Karapetyan, Mohammed Zuhair Mullath, Rudy H. Tanin, Hrant Gharibyan, Hayk Tepanyan. 2026-09-02. Benchmarking Zero-Setup Quantum Circuit Simulators. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09882

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