NVIDIA and Jülich simulate a 104-qubit fault-tolerant processor on JUPITER

[Hydra47]

NVIDIA and the Julich Supercomputing Centre have run one of the largest quantum simulations ever attempted. Quantum Computing Report's Mohamed Abdel-Kareem reports that the teams simulated a 104 qubit fault tolerant quantum processor on JUPITER, described as Europe's first exascale supercomputer. The result was announced at GTC Berlin

The simulation modelled a technique called magic state cultivation under realistic noise. Magic states are needed for the operations that make a quantum computer universal, and producing them cheaply is one of the biggest challenges in error correction. The release claims cultivation needs up to 90 percent fewer physical qubits than the older distillation factory approach

The numbers are huge. The run used 8,192 GH200 Grace Hopper superchips and tracked about 35.2 trillion amplitudes, held in 512 tebibytes of GPU memory. The noise model included coherent phase noise and leakage into a third energy level, which makes it much more realistic than simple textbook noise

The error correction setup moved from a distance three colour code to a distance seven hybrid of colour and surface codes. NVIDIA says development was staged on its own GB200 systems, cutting the work from weeks to days. Earlier work at Julich had simulated 50 qubits without noise, so this is a big jump

We discussed Google's magic state cultivation work recently, and this simulation backs up the idea at a scale experiments cannot yet reach. Classical simulation like this helps hardware teams test designs before they build them. The performance claims come from the company release, so independent analysis will be welcome

How useful are giant classical simulations for designing quantum computers? And is magic state cultivation the answer to the magic state problem?

NVIDIA and Jülich Run 104-Qubit Magic State Cultivation Simulation on JUPITER Supercomputer - Quantum Computing Reportquantumcomputingreport.com