What is cuQuantum? ¶

The NVIDIA cuQuantum SDK (not to be confused with CUDA Quantum) is a collection of libraries for high-performance simulation of quantum computers on GPUs. cuQuantum includes, and may refer to:

• cuStateVec, a GPU state-vector simulator,
• cuTensorNet, a GPU tensor-network simulator, and
• the cuQuantum Appliance, a multi-GPU and multi-node compatible Docker container with cuStateVec and cuTensorNet pre-installed.

The PennyLane lightning.gpu simulator leverages cuStateVec to enable GPU-accelerated state-vector simulation directly within PennyLane. In addition, it includes the classically-efficient adjoint differentiation method, allowing for high-performance quantum machine learning workflows. For more details, see our PennyLane performance overview.