Quantum and classical parallelism in parity algorithms for ensemble quantum computers

The determination of the parity of a string of N binary digits is a well-known problem in classical as well as quantum information processing, which can be formulated as an oracle problem. It has been established that quantum algorithms require at least N/2 oracle calls. We present an algorithm that reaches this lower bound and is also optimal in terms of additional gate operations required. We discuss its application to pure and mixed states. Since it can be applied directly to thermal states, it does not suffer from signal loss associated with pseudo-pure-state preparation. For ensemble quantum computers, the number of oracle calls can be further reduced by a factor 2(k), with k is an element of{1,2,...,log(2)(N/2)}, provided the signal-to-noise ratio is sufficiently high. This additional speed-up is linked to (classical) parallelism of the ensemble quantum computer. Experimental realizations are demonstrated on a liquid-state NMR quantum computer.