NVIDIA GPUs Power World's Largest Quantum Chip Simulation

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with NVIDIA, has achieved the world's largest full quantum chip simulation using 6,724 NVIDIA GPUs on the Perlmutter supercomputer. The simulation, announced on November 19, 2025, utilized GPU-accelerated Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to model a 1 cm quantum chip with over 10 billion grid points at micron resolution.

Key Highlights of the Simulation

The simulation leveraged NVIDIA's CUDA platform to accelerate the ARTEMIS simulation package.
It successfully modeled a full quantum chip on NVIDIA GPUs within Perlmutter.
Researchers observed the propagation of control signals through the chip at femtosecond time resolution.

Technical Details

The ARTEMIS platform optimizes simulations for parallelization on NVIDIA GPUs, providing a full-wave, time-domain electromagnetic solver. This allows for accurate modeling of large, chip-scale systems while preserving fine spatial and temporal details. The simulation took nearly eight hours, modeling 1.5 million time steps to reach 1 nanosecond of physical time.

Implications for Quantum Computing

The NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform offers tools to accelerate quantum computing workloads, including projects like Google’s Willow chip. This simulation marks a significant step toward building more robust quantum chips and advancing quantum computing technologies. By using the CUDA platform, researchers can test novel qubit architectures, reduce noise sources and cross-talk, and validate quantum chip designs before fabrication.

Conclusion

The successful simulation demonstrates the potential of GPU-accelerated tools in quantum chip design, paving the way for future innovations in quantum computing.