A team of Chinese researchers leveraging the new exascale Sunway system to simulate quantum circuits won the 2021 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize at a hybrid virtual/in person supercomputing (SC21) conference held in St. Louis, U.S. state Missouri, on Thursday.

The team used the sampling of quantum states of a random quantum circuit as an example problem for the closing of the hotly debated quantum advantage. The researchers' random quantum circuit simulator, combined with the firepower of the Sunway exascale system, simulated a 10X10(qubits)X(1+40+1)(depth) circuit at a sustained performance of a staggering 1.2 exaflops of single-precision computing power, or 4.4 exaflops of mixed-precision, which reduced the simulation sampling time to 304 seconds from that previous estimate of 10,000 years, ACM said in a news release on Thursday.

The fourteen researchers in the team, who are affiliated to Zhejiang Lab, Tsinghua University, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi and the Shanghai Research Center for Quantum Sciences, respectively, leveraged the massive new Sunway exascale system that was more or less revealed during SC21 to conduct groundbreaking simulation of a quantum circuit.

In their prize-winning work, the researchers introduced a systematic design process that covers the algorithm, parallelization, and architecture required for the simulation.

Founded in 1947, ACM is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, claiming nearly 100,000 student and professional members as of 2019. The non-profit professional membership group's Gordon Bell Prize is awarded each year to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. Financial support of the 10,000 U.S. dollars award is provided by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing.

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