Quantum Computing Benchmarking Framework Reveals Substantial Performance Gap

A team of researchers from Sandia National Laboratories, Quantinuum, and NVIDIA has developed a new benchmarking framework called QUOPS (Quantum Universal Operations Performance System) to measure the performance of quantum computers.

QUOPS is an architecture-agnostic framework that evaluates the full system execution of quantum computers, including compilation, error correction, syndrome decoding, and error mitigation. It measures two top-level system metrics: Q (QUOPS score), which defines the maximum circuit size successfully executed within a given volume at a minimum mean process polarization threshold, and Ω (QUOPS rate), which measures the net operational throughput in executed operations per second.

The team tested QUOPS on several leading hardware platforms, including Quantinuum's Helios-1, Google's Willow, and IBM's ibm_boston. The results showed a significant gap between contemporary hardware and utility-scale application requirements, with targets of Q ≈ 2.5 × 10⁸ for factoring RSA-2048 and Q ≈ 3.4 × 10⁸ for FeMoco energy eigenvalue calculations.