Alibaba Cloud Quantum Development Kit: Large-Scale Classical Simulation of Quantum Circuits

Abstract

We report, in a sequence of notes, our work on the Alibaba Cloud Quantum Development Kit (AC-QDK). AC-QDK provides a set of tools for aiding the development of both quantum computing algorithms and quantum processors, and is powered by a large-scale classical simulator deployed on Alibaba Cloud. In this note, we report the computational experiments demonstrating the classical simulation capability of AC-QDK. We use as a benchmark the random quantum circuits designed for Google's Bristlecone QPU {\cite{GRCS}}. We simulate Bristlecone-70 circuits with depth \(1 + 32 + 1\) in \(0.43\) second per amplitude, using \(1449\) Alibaba Cloud Elastic Computing Service (ECS) instances, each with \(88\) Intel Xeon(Skylake) Platinum 8163 vCPU cores @ 2.5 GHz and \(160\) gigabytes of memory. By comparison, the previously best reported results for the same tasks are \(104\) and \(135\) seconds, using NASA's HPC Pleiades and Electra systems, respectively ({arXiv:1811.09599}). Furthermore, we report simulations of Bristlecone-70 with depth \(1+36+1\) and depth \(1+40+1\) in \(5.6\) and \(580.7\) seconds per amplitude, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first successful simulations of instances at these depths.