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

We report our work on the Alibaba Cloud Quantum Development Platform(AC-QDP). AC-QDP 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-QDP. 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.