Here, I summarize the results presented in B. Kraus, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 250503 (2011). Recently, it has been shown that certain circuits, the so-called match gate circuits, can be compressed to an exponentially smaller universal quantum computation. We use this result to demonstrate that the simulation of a 1-D Ising chain consisting of n qubits can be performed on a universal quantum computer running on only log(n) qubits. We show how the adiabatic evolution can be simulated on this exponentially smaller system and how the magnetization can be measured. Since the Ising model displays a quantum phase transition, this result implies that a quantum phase transition of a very large system can be observed with current technology.