Yuri Alexeev, a Computational Science principal project specialist, and his summer student, Cameron A. Ibrahim (supervised by Professor Ilya Safro from the University of Delaware), have won the Best Student Paper Award from the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) High Performance Extreme Computing (HPEC) conference for their paper, ​“Constructing Optimal Contraction Trees for Tensor Network Quantum Circuit Simulation.” Other authors include Danylo Lykov (Argonne National Laboratory) and Zichang He (UC Santa Barbara).

The Best Student Paper Award is awarded to the top paper where the first author was a student when doing the presented work. This work is funded by an Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research award from the National Science Foundation to PI Yuri Alexeev and co-PI Ilya Safro.

“Tensor networks have important applications in scientific domains like quantum physics and chemistry, quantum information science and machine learning,” said Alexeev. ​“This work represents an important advancement to dramatically reduce memory and computational requirements to simulate quantum circuits classically by finding optimal tensor contraction sequences.”

The IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference, organized by MIT in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, is the largest computing conference in New England. It was presented virtually Sept. 19-23, 2022.  HPEC features a wide range of cutting-edge work on AI, machine learning, big data, graph analytics, cloud computing, sensor processing, cyber, parallel computing, GPU computing, database technology, quantum computing, tutorials and talks from invited speakers.