SC21: Chinese Supercomputer Approaches Quantum Performance

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eetimes.com, Nov. 24, 2021 – 

At the SC21 conference, a Chinese team claimed the prestigious Gordon Bell prize (roughly analogous to the Nobel prize for supercomputing). The team's paper, "Closing the Quantum Supremacy Gap: Achieving Real-Time Simulation of a Random Circuit Using a New Sunway Supercomputer," describes how they used a new supercomputer to simulate a random quantum circuit.

In fact, this is the same benchmark that led Google to controversially claim "quantum supremacy" for its Sycamore quantum computer in 2019. Sycamore managed the benchmark in 200 seconds, saying a classical supercomputer like Summit would need 10,000 years (this was refuted by IBM at the time, who said the real figure was closer to 2.5 days). The new Chinese supercomputer, combined with the algorithmic work of the Chinese team, can do it in 304 seconds. It seems quantum still has the lead over classical supercomputers, but the gap is closing.

The paper describes the single-precision performance of the Sunway-based supercomputer at 1.2 Exaflops. While this doesn't officially confirm China's rumoured Exascale capabilities (1.2 Exaflops is single precision; the term "Exascale" requires 1 Exaflops double precision performance), it does seem likely that this new supercomputer is one of the world's most powerful. While this supercomputer hasn't been named, we do know the research used 41.9 million Sunway RISC processor cores for computation.

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