Benchmarking 50-Photon Gaussian Boson Sampling on the Sunway TaihuLight

Abstract

Boson sampling is expected to be an important milestone that will demonstrate quantum computational advantage (or quantum supremacy). This work establishes the benchmarking of Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) with threshold detection based on the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. To achieve the best performance and provide a competitive scenario for future quantum computing studies, the selected simulation algorithm is fully optimized based on a set of innovative approaches, including a parallel framework with almost perfect load balance and an instruction-level optimizing scheme based on a shortest-path-based instruction scheduling. In addition, data precision is carefully processed by an integer-instruction-based and multiple-precision fixed-point implementation, including 128- and 256-bit precison mode, which can be appropriately selected based on an adaptive precision optimizing scheme. Based on these methods, a highly efficient parallel quantum sampling algorithm is designed. The largest run enables us to obtain one Torontonian function of a <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$100\times 100$</tex-math></inline-formula> submatrix from 50-photon GBS within 20 hours in 128-bit precision and 2 days in 256-bit precision. To our knowledge, this was the largest quantum computing simulation based on Boson Sampling by using modern supercomputers.