A fast and frugal Gaussian boson sampling emulator.

A classical simulation using minimal computational resources outperforms Gaussian boson sampling experiments of 100 modes on benchmark tests.

• Why it matters: Matching the performance of advanced quantum devices on sampling problems is limited by high memory and computational costs, restricting such simulations to few supercomputers.
• What they did: The authors developed a classical emulator that runs efficiently on a single CPU or GPU, leveraging parallelization to match sampling rates previously achievable only with over 100 GPUs.
• The result: This approach suggests potential for scaling to larger systems and broader applications, including simulating qubit-based sampling problems and creating classical surrogates for quantum algorithms.