Simulations of Quantum Networks on High-Performance Computers*

Simulation has emerged as a useful tool for quantum network performance evaluations, protocol design, and experiment planning. However, the need to explore a large parameter space and perform simulations at the individual photon level lead to prohibitively long execution times. To reduce the execution time while retaining simulation accuracy, we introduce new parallel simulation techniques that provide better scalability for large networks. We address the unique challenges with parallel simulation of quantum networks, such as the need to track entanglement across the network. We develop the first parallel discrete event simulator (PDES) of quantum networks by extending the SeQUeNCe quantum network simulator. We describe our PDES quantum simulator design, including a centralized manager of quantum states, offloading of work to processes, and process synchronization optimization. Finally, we also quantify the benefits of PDES on simulation scalability by simulating several large-scale quantum networks, including linear networks, caveman graph topologies, and Internet autonomous system (AS) networks of various sizes.