The Applications of the Quantum Computer and the Exascale Computer [Commentary] [Commentary

Abstract

Supercomputers are making rapid progress. For the world's fastest supercomputer “Frontier,” the computing speed has reached 10 trillion floating-point instruction cycles per second (10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">18</sup> , exaFLOPS), making many existing complex problems, including weather forecasting and disaster prevention, more accurate than ever. However, the calculation of real systems with a large number of electrons is still difficult. Exascale computers can simulate some systems with dual quantum states, but in the case of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> dual quantum states, the exponential growth of 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</sup> makes the calculation to simulate real system impossible. If we want to understand the dynamic quantum state evolution of a real matter, it is even more difficult to track the dynamics of “every possible” configuration of a huge number of 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</sup> quantum states. If n is 20, it will take about 128 KB of memory to store with the current computer's memory, which can be done by ordinary computers. When there are hundreds of electrons, the memory required to store this system exceeds the number of particles in the entire universe. Unfortunately, almost all materials and drugs have at least hundreds of electrons, which means that direct use of Exascale computers to develop and design any new drugs and materials also becomes impossible. At the same time, after the popularization of artificial intelligence and deep learning, it is also found that the computing power, bandwidth, and memory space of classical computers are not enough, while quantum computing has at least the following three advantages and has the opportunity to provide solutions for complex systems.