State-of-the-art Classical Tools to Benchmark NISQ Devices

In the race to show quantum advantage, early quantum devices must be compared to the state-of-the-art classical technology currently available. At the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab (QuAIL) at NASA Ames, we are continuously developing new classical algorithms to benchmark/validate quantum hardware and to raise the bar to claim quantum advantage. In my talk, I will present some of our latest state-of-the-art classical tools to optimize classical cost functions (in collaboration with Texas A&M University), including numerical results on hard benchmark problem sets. Moreover, I will present our optimized classical simulator for large quantum circuits (in collaboration with the Google AI team), including numerical simulations of the Google Bristlecone quantum processing unit.