Quantum Supremacy Circuit Simulation on Sunway TaihuLight

TL;DR

This paper presents a large-scale classical simulation of 49-qubit quantum supremacy circuits on Sunway TaihuLight, achieving the deepest simulations to date for such circuits, aiding benchmarking of quantum computers.

Contribution

The authors develop a high-performance simulator capable of simulating 49-qubit circuits at unprecedented depths, advancing classical benchmarking of quantum supremacy circuits.

Findings

Simulated 49-qubit circuits of depth 39 for full state-vector

Simulated 49-qubit circuits of depth 55 for amplitude calculation

Achieved the deepest simulation depths for 49-qubit quantum circuits to date

Abstract

With the rapid progress made by industry and academia, quantum computers with dozens of qubits or even larger size are being realized. However, the fidelity of existing quantum computers often sharply decreases as the circuit depth increases. Thus, an ideal quantum circuit simulator on classical computers, especially on high-performance computers, is needed for benchmarking and validation. We design a large-scale simulator of universal random quantum circuits, often called 'quantum supremacy circuits', and implement it on Sunway TaihuLight. The simulator can be used to accomplish the following two tasks: 1) Computing a complete output state-vector; 2) Calculating one or a few amplitudes. We target the simulation of 49-qubit circuits. For task 1), we successfully simulate such a circuit of depth 39, and for task 2) we reach the 55-depth level. To the best of our knowledge, both of the simulation results reach the largest depth for 49-qubit quantum supremacy circuits.