Closing the "quantum supremacy" gap: achieving real-time simulation of a random quantum circuit using a new Sunway supercomputer

We develop a high-performance tensor-based simulator for random quantum circuits(RQCs) on the new Sunway supercomputer. Our major innovations include: (1) a near-optimal slicing scheme, and a path-optimization strategy that considers both complexity and compute density; (2) a three-level parallelization scheme that scales to about 42 million cores; (3) a fused permutation and multiplication design that improves the compute efficiency for a wide range of tensor contraction scenarios; and (4) a mixed-precision scheme to further improve the performance. Our simulator effectively expands the scope of simulatable RQCs to include the 10X10(qubits)X(1+40+1)(depth) circuit, with a sustained performance of 1.2 Eflops (single-precision), or 4.4 Eflops (mixed-precision)as a new milestone for classical simulation of quantum circuits; and reduces the simulation sampling time of Google Sycamore to 304 seconds, from the previously claimed 10,000 years.