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Establishing the Quantum Supremacy Frontier with a 281 Pflop/s Simulation

Benjamin Villalonga, Dmitry Lyakh, Sergio Boixo, Hartmut Neven, Travis S. Humble, Rupak Biswas, Eleanor G. Rieffel, Alan Ho et al.

Quantum Science and Technology 5, 3 (2020), 2019

Abstract

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers are entering an era in which they can perform computational tasks beyond the capabilities of the most powerful classical computers, thereby achieving "Quantum Supremacy", a major milestone in quantum computing. NISQ Supremacy requires comparison with a state-of-the-art classical simulator. We report HPC simulations of hard random quantum circuits (RQC), which have been recently used as a benchmark for the first experimental demonstration of Quantum Supremacy, sustaining an average performance of 281 Pflop/s (true single precision) on Summit, currently the fastest supercomputer in the World. These simulations were carried out using qFlex, a tensor-network-based classical high-performance simulator of RQCs. Our results show an advantage of many orders of magnitude in energy consumption of NISQ devices over classical supercomputers. In addition, we propose a standard benchmark for NISQ computers based on qFlex.

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