This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Quantum computers are no longer theoretical concepts. Today, they are being developed to tackle a range of complex problems, including exploring financial risk, modeling complex molecules and optimizing massive logistics networks.
However, until now, there has been no way to benchmark the computational power of different systems on the same scale to see how they compare. A team led by Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S. has devised a universal testing standard that provides an apples-to-apples performance measure. They put Google, IBM and Quantinuum hardware through the benchmark and not only found significant gaps between them but also discovered that current systems were still miles away from solving real-world problems.
The team calls its test Quantum Universal Operation Performance System, or QUOPS for short. It is designed to measure the size of the largest computationally relevant quantum circuits a quantum computer can successfully run, as well as the speed at which it can complete those operations. Instead of evaluating individual qubits (quantum analogs of classical bits) and the errors in individual operations, which are among the traditional ways to measure progress, QUOPS runs randomized patterns of qubit operations.
These act as stand-ins for the types of circuits used in some real scientific calculations. The test results revealed stark differences between each quantum computer, which were tied to how they were designed and built, as the team highlights in their paper posted on the arXiv preprint server. Quantinuum's Helios-1 trapped-ion processor handled the largest calculations, achieving a QUOPS score of more than 1,500.
That was helped by its flexible layout, in which qubits can communicate with any other qubit. However, moving the ions takes time, which makes the system relatively slow. Superconducting processors from Google and IBM took the opposite approach.
Qubits are organized in rigid grids on their chips, which restricts their communication and limits their QUOPS scores to around 200. But the superconducting systems were much faster. Google's Willow processor handled 20 million operations per second.
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