Researchers from the Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT) and ETH Zurich have announced qblaze, a state-of-the-art quantum simulator that establishes a major milestone in quantum computing research.
The new quantum simulator qblaze sets a new benchmark in quantum simulation by factoring the largest number to date using Shor’s algorithm on a quantum circuit simulator – a 39-bit integer (549,755,813,701). Remarkably, this matches the previous record set with the specialized (for Shor’s algorithm) emulator shorgpu – except shorgpu used 2048 GPUs, while qblaze only uses 2 CPUs, a task thought to be impossible before ablaze. Interestingly, despite recent advances, the largest number factored on an actual quantum computer to date with Shor’s algorithm, is 21.
Beyond its record-breaking achievement, qblaze demonstrates extraordinary computational efficiency, outperforming widely used publicly available industry quantum simulators such as IBM’s Qiskit Aer and Microsoft’s Q#. On standard quantum workloads, for instance, Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms, qblaze achieves a speed-up exceeding 2000× over these platforms.
This breakthrough is made possible by a novel sparse data structure and highly optimized parallel algorithms, enabling qblaze to scale efficiently on conventional hardware. The research paper describing ablaze has been accepted for presentation at ACM OOPSLA 2025 – one of the world’s premier conferences in programming languages and systems, held this week in Singapore.
Fully open source, qblaze can be used as a drop-in replacement for IBM’s Qiskit simulators or use directly in any other quantum frameworks. All information including documentation, examples and source code are available at qblaze.org
The qblaze project is the result of a collaboration between teams at INSAIT and ETH Zurich: Hristo Venev (INSAIT), Dimitar Dimitrov (INSAIT), Timon Gehr (ETH Zurich), Martin Vechev (INSAIT and ETH Zurich), and Thien Udomsrirungruang (former INSAIT Summer Research Fellow).