A Benchmark Test of Boson Sampling on Tianhe-2 Supercomputer

Understand

Boson sampling, thought to be intractable classically, can be solved by a quantum machine composed of merely generation, linear evolution and detection of single photons.

• Such an analog quantum computer for this specific problem provides a shortcut to boost the absolute computing power of quantum computers to beat classical ones.
• However, the capacity bound of classical computers for simulating boson sampling has not yet been identified.
• Here we simulate boson sampling on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer which occupied the first place in the world ranking six times from 2013 to 2016.