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The team behind the New Generation Sunway exascale supercomputer has won a top international prize for high-performance computing. Photo: Shutterstock

China’s Sunway exascale supercomputer team wins top prize for closing Google’s quantum supremacy gap

  • Scientists recognised for completing task on a classical computer in roughly the same time as a quantum device
  • Claim of absolute advantage of quantum computing technology, ‘no longer holds up’, lead researcher says
Science
A Chinese team of scientists has won a top annual international prize for a breakthrough that closes the gap in “quantum supremacy”.

The Association for Computing Machinery said on Friday that the 14-member team behind the New Generation Sunway exascale supercomputer was this year’s recipient of the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing.

The new Sunway supercomputer completed a challenging calculation task almost as quickly as Sycamore, a quantum computer launched by Google in 2019.

Google had claimed that even the fastest supercomputer would need to spend over 10,000 years to compute what Sycamore could do in 200 seconds. But the new Sunway supercomputer finished the same job in about 300 seconds, and with much higher accuracy.

In a conference in Zhuhai last month, Liu Xin, lead scientist of the team with Zhejiang Lab in Hangzhou, said the quantum simulator developed by her team could do tasks 1,000 times more complex than those run on Sycamore with calculation power equivalent to 400 qubits, much more than the capacity of any quantum computer.

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Google’s claim of quantum supremacy, which means the absolute advantage of quantum computing technology, “no longer holds up”, she said.

The Sunway exascale computer had reached the speed of 4.4 exaflops, or quintillion calculations per second with more than 10 million CPU cores, Zhejiang Lab said on its social media account on Friday.

“This is a record of high accuracy floating point calculation performance on supercomputers worldwide,” it said.

This speed makes Sunway 10 times as fast as Japan’s Fugaku, the most powerful computing machine on the Top500 list, a semi-official ranking of supercomputers.

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China has built three exascale computers. The peak performance of these machines have not been released officially.

The performance of Sunway still falls far behind Zuchongzhi, a Chinese-developed quantum computer that is 10 million times faster than Sycamore.

Liu and colleagues said classical supercomputers and quantum computers were not opponents, but teammates.

“Quantum computing not only poses new performance challenges for traditional supercomputing, but also provides new reference to algorithms and ideas; and the simulation capabilities of traditional supercomputing also provide reliable verification for the current research and development of high-noise quantum chips,” the researchers said.

“There is a good trend of mutual complementation and common development of the two.”

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