Classical Simulation of Intermediate-Size Quantum Circuits

Abstract

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 $8\times 8$ qubit circuit with depth $40$ was previously beyond the reach of supercomputers. Our algorithm can compute this within $2$ minutes using a small portion ($\approx$ 14% of the nodes) of the cluster. Furthermore, by successfully simulating quantum supremacy circuits of size $9\times 9\times 40$, $10\times 10\times 35$, $11\times 11\times 31$, 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.