Benchmarking near-term quantum computers*

Presenter: David McKay, Manager, and Research Staff Member: Experimental Quantum Computing, IBM Research

As the field marches towards quantum advantage with near-term quantum processors, it becomes imperative to characterize, verify, and validate performance. An outstanding scientific challenge in the community is a scalable set of metrics or experiments which can shed light on the usability of a device for near-term algorithms. Moreover, it becomes critical to explore techniques to extend the computational reach of noisy systems, be it through understanding underlying non-idealities, or more efficient circuit compilation. In this talk I will review the work we are doing at IBM to benchmark near-term quantum computers and I will discuss our recent results on quantum volume, large-scale entanglement and randomized benchmarking.

*This work was supported by the Army Research Office under contract W911NF-14-1-0124