qsim provides Bazel build and test rules
for qsim tests and sample applications. The Bazel targets are tests and
apps; you can combine these with the bazel commands build, test, and
run and configuration flags suitable for your computer hardware architecture
and software environment.
On hardware and software platforms that support them, qsim can be configured to take advantage of certain hardware optimizations, specifically AVX (a hardware extension for optimizing vector arithmetic), SSE (streaming SIMD extensions), and/or OpenMP (a software API for shared-memory parallel programming). By default, the basic qsim build configuration does not compile in support for these features. (On some systems such as MacOS on Apple Silicon, they are not available.) A basic build & test run is obtained using the following command:
bazel test tests:all
As an example of using optimization options, if your computer has support for AVX and OpenMP, the following command will build and run all the tests with the appropriate config options to make use of those features:
bazel test --config=avx --config=openmp tests:all
To run a sample simulation, use the command below. Note that this command
requires the circuit_q24 file to be specified both on the command line and in
the data field of the qsim_base BUILD rule.
bazel run --config=avx --config=openmp apps:qsim_base -- -c circuits/circuit_q24
Build configurations
Depending on your computer's hardware architecture and the features available,
different Bazel config flags (such as --config=avx, above) can be used to
control which hardware optimizers are included in a given build or test run.
Vector arithmetic optimizers
Pick at most one of the following options:
# Use AVX instructions for vector arithmetic.
--config=avx
# Use SSE instructions for vector arithmetic.
--config=sse
# Do not use vector arithmetic optimization (default).
--config=basic
Parallelism optimizers
Pick at most one of the following options:
# Use OpenMP to run operations in parallel when possible.
--config=openmp
# Do not use OpenMP for parallelism (default).
--config=nopenmp
Memory allocators
TCMalloc is a fast, multithreaded
implementation of C's malloc() and C++'s new operator. It is an independent
open-source library developed by Google. TCMalloc can be used with qsim as an
alternative to the default malloc(). Pick at most one of the following
options:
# Use TCMalloc for memory allocation.
--config=tcmalloc
# Use malloc for memory allocation (default).
--config=malloc
Additional configuration options
To provide more information when building and testing qsim, you can add the
configuration option --config=verbose to any of the bazel commands above.
Other configuration options are described elsewhere in the qsim documentation.