  Rapid advances in quantum computing technology lead to an increasing need for
software simulators that enable both algorithm design and the validation of
results obtained from quantum hardware. This includes calculations that aim at
probing regimes of quantum advantage, where a quantum computer outperforms a
classical computer in the same task. High performance computing (HPC) platforms
play a crucial role as today's quantum devices already reach beyond the limits
of what powerful workstations can model, but a systematic evaluation of the
individual performance of the many offered simulation packages is lacking so
far. In this Technical Review, we benchmark several software packages capable
of simulating quantum dynamics with a special focus on HPC capabilities. We
develop a containerized toolchain for benchmarking a large set of simulation
packages on a local HPC cluster using different parallelisation capabilities,
and compare the performance and system size-scaling for three paradigmatic
quantum computing tasks. Our results can help finding the right package for a
given simulation task and lay the foundation for a systematic community effort
to benchmark and validate upcoming versions of existing and also newly
developed simulation packages.
