The SWQSIM achievement in which the Tsinghua DESS supercomputing team participated winning the 2021 Gordon Bell Prize has recently been rated as “Top Ten News Events on Scientific and Technological Advances in China and the World in 2021”. The news evaluation event has been held for 28 times by far as an important window for the public to have a comprehensive understanding of the latest scientific and technological developments at home and abroad. It is sponsored by Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, undertaken by the Bureau of Academic Divisions of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the General Office of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and China Science Daily. The results are decided through review and voting by academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

On the afternoon of November 18 (U.S. time), the Chinese supercomputing team won the 2021 Gordon Bell Prize, the highest international honor in the field of high-performance computing, for its achievement “Closing the Quantum Supremacy Gap: Achieving Real-Time Simulation of a Random Quantum Circuit Using a New Sunway Supercomputer” (SWQSIM).

SWQSIM developed by the Tsinghua DESS Supercomputing Team in collaboration with Zhejiang Lab, Tsinghua University, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi and the Shanghai Research Center for Quantum Sciences, proposed an approximate optimal parallel segmentation and contraction method and hybrid precision algorithm of tensor network, which can be efficiently extended to tens of millions of cores in parallel and achieve 4.4 Eflops mixed-precision. It is the highest hybrid precision floating-point computing performance currently known in the global supercomputing field, with its overall performance significantly outpacing that of Google quantum computer "Sycamore". It is the third time that the Tsinghua team has been recognized with Gordon Bell Prize, the most prestigious international award in the field of supercomputing application.

Prof. Mark Parsons, Chair of the 2021 Gordon Bell Prize Award Committee, announces the prize-winning team

Photographed by Jo Ramsey, SC Photography