like! Alibaba announces the development of the world's strongest quantum circuit simulator

On May 8th, Alibaba said that the Dharma Institute Quantum Lab recently developed the world's strongest quantum circuit simulator "Taizhang", and successfully simulated the 81-bit 40-layer Google random quantum circuit. Previously, the simulation to achieve this number of layers could only handle 49 bits.

Figure 1: Comparison of the results of Alibaba's "Taizhang" simulator and the current main simulator simulating Google's random circuit

As a disruptive technology, quantum computing has always been a hot topic in scientific research. However, the realization of quantum computing is very difficult. At present, the quantum computer with open technical parameters in the world has only 20 bits. The existence of quantum circuit simulators is to help understand and design quantum computer hardware and explore quantum algorithms and applications.

For the first time, "Taizhang" makes it possible to verify and test 50-200 qubits of "medium-scale" quantum algorithms, thus providing a powerful tool for assisting in the design of medium-scale quantum algorithms, quantum software and even quantum computers.

In March 2018, Google released a plan to develop the world's first high-quality 72-bit quantum computer, and previously proposed a set of random quantum circuits to achieve "quantum hegemony." Alibaba said. The result of "Taizhang" broke the original plan of Google to achieve quantum hegemony in this program.

Figure 2: The scale of the random quantum circuit (black line) simulated by "Taizhang" and the scale (red line) that Google Quantum hardware can achieve (based on Google's estimate of 7x7 in [Characterizing quantum supremacy in near-term devices])

Another highlight of the "Taizhang" is the minimal communication overhead, which can be based on the super-power of the online cluster of Alibaba Group's computing platform, to complete the simulation that the world's strongest supercomputer can't. In the simulation of 64 (8x8) bits and 40 layers, "Taizhang" can be completed in 2 minutes, and only 14% of the computing resources of the online cluster of Alibaba computing platform are used.