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arXiv:1907.11217

Alibaba Cloud Quantum Development Platform: Large-Scale Classical Simulation of Quantum Circuits

Fang Zhang, Cupjin Huang, Michael Newman, Junjie Cai, Huanjun Yu, Zhengxiong Tian, Bo Yuan, Haihong Xu, Junyin Wu, Xun Gao, Jianxin Chen, Márió Szegedy, Yaoyun Shi

Published Jul 25, 2019• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report, in a sequence of notes, our work on the Alibaba Cloud Quantum Development Platform(AC-QDP). AC-QDP provides a set of tools for aiding the development of both quantum computing algorithms and quantum processors, and is powered by a large-scale classical simulator deployed on Alibaba Cloud. In this note, we report the computational experiments demonstrating the classical simulation capability of AC-QDP. We use as a benchmark the random quantum circuits designed for Google's Bristlecone QPU {\cite{GRCS}}. We simulate Bristlecone-70 circuits with depth $1 + 32 + 1$ in $0.43$ second per amplitude, using $1449$ Alibaba Cloud Elastic Computing Service (ECS) instances, each with $88$ Intel Xeon(Skylake) Platinum 8163 vCPU cores @ 2.5 GHz and $160$ gigabytes of memory. By comparison, the previously best reported results for the same tasks are $104$ and $135$ seconds, using NASA's HPC Pleiades and Electra systems, respectively ({arXiv:1811.09599}). Furthermore, we report simulations of Bristlecone-70 with depth $1+36+1$ and depth $1+40+1$ in $5.6$ and $580.7$ seconds per amplitude, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first successful simulations of instances at these depths.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1907.11217

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Here we present a flexible tensor network based simulator for quantum circuits on different topologies, including the Google Bristlecone QPU. Our simulator can compute both exact amplitudes, a task essential for the verification of the quantum hardware, as well as low-fidelity amplitudes to mimic Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. While our simulator can be used to compute amplitudes of arbitrary quantum circuits, we focus on random quantum circuits (RQCs) [Boixo et al., Nature Physics 14] in the range of sizes expected for supremacy experiments. Our simulator enables the simulation of sampling on quantum circuits that were out of reach for previous approaches. For instance, our simulator is able to output single amplitudes with depth 1+32+1 for the full Bristlecone QPU in less than (f⋅4200)(f \cdot 4200)(f⋅4200) hours on a single core, where 0<f≤10<f\leq10<f≤1 is the target fidelity, on 2×202\times202×20-core Intel Xeon Gold 6148 processors (Skylake). We also estimate that computing 10610^6106 amplitudes (with fidelity 0.50\%) needed to sample from the full Bristlecone QPU with depth (1+32+1) would require about 3.5 days using the NASA Pleiades and Electra supercomputers combined. In addition, we discuss the hardness of the classical simulation of RQCs, as well as give evidence for the higher complexity in the simulation of Bristlecone topology as compared to other two-dimensional grids with the same number of qubits. Our analysis is supported by extensive simulations on NASA HPC clusters Pleiades and Electra. For the most computationally demanding simulation we had, namely the simulation of a 606060-qubit sub-lattice of Bristlecone, the two HPC clusters combined reached a peak of 20 PFLOPS (single precision), that is 64%64\%64% of their maximum achievable performance. To date, this numerical computation is the largest in terms of sustained PFLOPS and number of nodes utilized ever run on NASA HPC clusters.
We introduce a distributed classical simulation algorithm for general quantum circuits, and present numerical results for calculating the output probabilities of universal random circuits. We find that we can simulate more qubits to greater depth than previously reported using the cluster supported by the Data Infrastructure and Search Technology Division of the Alibaba Group. For example, computing a single amplitude of an 8×88\times 88×8 qubit circuit with depth 404040 was previously beyond the reach of supercomputers. Our algorithm can compute this within 222 minutes using a small portion (≈\approx≈ 14% of the nodes) of the cluster. Furthermore, by successfully simulating quantum supremacy circuits of size 9×9×409\times 9\times 409×9×40, $10\times 10\times 35 $, 11×11×3111\times 11\times 3111×11×31, and $12\times 12\times 27 $, we give evidence that noisy random circuits with realistic physical parameters may be simulated classically. This suggests that either harder circuits or error-correction may be vital for achieving quantum supremacy from random circuit sampling.
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