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

05/01/2019

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by   Benjamin Villalonga, et al.

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Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers aim to 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), sustaining an average performance of 281 Pflop/s (true single precision) on Summit, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world. In addition, we propose a standard benchmark for NISQ computers based on qFlex, a tensor-network-based classical high-performance simulator of RQC, which are considered the leading proposal for Quantum Supremacy.