NVIDIA Runs Record Fault-Tolerant Quantum Simulation on JUPITER

NVIDIA researchers ran what the company describes as the largest comprehensive simulation of a fault-tolerant quantum system on the JUPITER supercomputer at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The model covered 104 qubits and included realistic hardware noise.

JUPITER uses NVIDIA GH200 superchips. The simulation modeled magic-state cultivation, an approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing that NVIDIA says requires 90% fewer physical qubits than previous methods.

Simulation includes hardware noise

Quantum operations generate noise and errors, so fault-tolerant systems must repeatedly produce magic states, a specific qubit arrangement consumed during computation. NVIDIA said the simulation validated a state-of-the-art cultivation method under realistic noisy conditions.

The company said the results can help researchers assess future designs before building hardware and reduce reliance on trial and error. NVIDIA identified drug discovery, financial modeling and materials science as potential application areas.

Scaling from four GPUs to 8,192

The team developed and tested the methods on a GB200 NVL72 system at NVIDIA’s Accelerated Quantum Research Center. Tests were scaled from four GPUs to hundreds before being moved to 8,192 GPUs on JUPITER.

NVIDIA said the work reduced one simulation effort from several weeks to days. The calculations used the cuQuantum software and the CUDA-Q platform’s fault-tolerant logical layer.

Earlier work at Jülich simulated 50 qubits under ideal, noiseless conditions. NVIDIA said the new project is the first comprehensive simulation at this scale to model a fault-tolerant quantum processor with realistic errors.