Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley have completed one of the most detailed simulations ever performed on a quantum microchip. The project marks an important advance in refining the hardware needed for quantum technologies.
To carry out the work, the team relied on more than 7,000 NVIDIA GPUs running on the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facility.
Simulating quantum chips before they are physically built allows scientists to evaluate how they will function and identify potential design flaws early. By testing performance in a virtual environment, researchers can improve reliability and reduce costly fabrication iterations. Zhi Jackie Yao and Andy Nonaka of the Applied Mathematics and Computational Research (AMCR) Division at Berkeley Lab, both part of the Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA), develop advanced electromagnetic models to analyze how these chips behave, a crucial step toward building more capable quantum hardware.
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