IBM Comments on Google’s Quantum Supremacy (or Not)
Bringing this to our readers; recommend you read it right from the IBM research blog at the source link below. Because Quantum is Coming. Qubit.
Waiting for the Quantum Simulation Revolution
In brief…
+ Recent advances in quantum computing have resulted in two 53-qubit processors: one from our group in IBM and a device described in the leaked preprint from Google. In the preprint, it is argued that their device reached “quantum supremacy” and that “a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task.” We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced.
Because the original meaning of the term “quantum supremacy,” as proposed by John Preskill in 2012, was to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, this threshold has not been met.
+ When their comparison to classical was made, they relied on an advanced simulation that leverages parallelism, fast and error-free computation, and large aggregate RAM, but failed to fully account for plentiful disk storage. In contrast, our Schrödinger-style classical simulation approach uses both RAM and hard drive space to store and manipulate the state vector. Performance-enhancing techniques employed by our simulation methodology include circuit partitioning, tensor contraction deferral, gate aggregation and batching, careful orchestration of collective communication, and well-known optimization methods such as cache-blocking and double-buffering in order to overlap the communication transpiring between and computation taking place on the CPU and GPU components of the hybrid nodes. Further details may be found in Leveraging Secondary Storage to Simulate Deep 54-qubit Sycamore Circuits.
+ It is well known in the quantum community that we at IBM are concerned of where the term “quantum supremacy” has gone. The origins of the term, including both a reasoned defense and a candid reflection on some of its controversial dimensions, were recently discussed by John Preskill in a thoughtful article in Quanta Magazine. Professor Preskill summarized the two main objections to the term that have arisen from the community by explaining that the “word exacerbates the already overhyped reporting on the status of quantum technology” and that “through its association with white supremacy, evokes a repugnant political stance.”
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