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

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that classical simulations of random quantum circuits can reach 281 Pflop/s on Summit, establishing a new benchmark for quantum supremacy and highlighting the energy efficiency gap between NISQ devices and classical supercomputers.

## Contribution

It introduces a high-performance classical simulation method for quantum circuits and sets a new standard benchmark for NISQ computers to demonstrate quantum supremacy.

## Key findings

- Classical simulation achieved 281 Pflop/s on Summit.
- Simulations used tensor-network-based qFlex simulator.
- NISQ devices are vastly more energy-efficient than classical supercomputers.

## 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.