Jane Edwards
A team of researchers used quantum volume as a benchmark and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Quantum Computing User Program to compare the performance of 24 quantum computers offered by companies such as IBM, Quantinuum and Rigetti.
Researchers found that most of the quantum processors, also known as noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, operated close to the quantum volume advertised by companies, ORNL said Tuesday.
Results showed that the QV values achieved in the tests usually lag behind the vendors’ officially reported results, according to the study published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering.
“This measure isn’t perfect, but it tells you which quantum computers will be able to execute quantum circuits of a certain size and depth reasonably well,” Elijah Pelofske, the study’s lead author and a student researcher at New Mexico Tech and Los Alamos National Laboratory, said of quantum volume.
Researchers cited the challenge of verifying QV values in the study.
“We did indeed have trouble verifying the quantum volume for each device as reported by the vendors,” said Stephan Eidenbenz, a computer scientist at LANL and the study’s senior author.
“That’s not to imply the vendors have been untruthful. They have a better understanding of their devices than we or the average user do, so they can coax a little more performance out of the machine than we can. There were certain optimizations we did not try to make, for example. We wanted to get the basic performance an ordinary user could expect out of the box,” added Eidenbenz.
