Yonsei University Deploys IBM Nighthawk Quantum Processor for Rare Disease Research

The IBM Nighthawk quantum processing unit (QPU) will be installed at Yonsei University's Songdo International Campus facility in November 2026, marking its first deployment outside of IBM. This upgrade will replace the existing Eagle processor and is aimed at identifying the biological mechanism of Leigh syndrome, a fatal mitochondrial disease with no cure.

The Nighthawk chip has a square lattice structure with each qubit connected to four direct neighbors, increasing connectivity by 60% compared to the heavy-hex layout used in Eagle. This allows for circuits 30% more complex at equivalent error rates, reducing SWAP gate overhead and errors accumulated during computation.

According to Director Jung Jae-ho of Yonsei Quantum Initiative, Nighthawk can perform about 40% more computation than Eagle at the same error level. However, it is essential to note that per-gate error rates are higher in Nighthawk, but software-level crosstalk suppression can mitigate this issue.

The deployment at Yonsei will run a specific scientific computation that would take Japan's Fugaku supercomputer 48 uninterrupted years to complete on its own. The quantum computer will narrow down key candidates for calculation, and the classical supercomputer will handle everything else, reducing the calculation period from 48 years to just days.

Yonsei's collaboration with RIKEN in Japan and Cleveland Clinic has already achieved significant results in simulating a 12,635-atom protein complex using quantum-centric supercomputing. The Leigh syndrome work follows this pattern but shifts the application domain into active rare disease research.