The Challenge
Quantum computers promise to deliver an exponential advantage over classical computers. What’s less clear is how to quantify this advantage for solving computationally hard problems, and when exactly that advantage could arrive.
To better understand the future utility of quantum computers, the US Government’s Department of Defense (more specifically, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) is funding Zapata to build application-specific benchmark tests to compare the performance of different quantum hardware backends. DARPA is also interested in estimating the hardware resources that will be required for different quantum applications.
The Approach
In 2022, Zapata received an award from the US Government to develop software tools for quantum benchmarking. As part of the award, Zapata is working alongside partners in enterprise, academia, and technology to create hardware-agnostic benchmarks to quantify computational utility.
Zapata will determine the resources — both classical and quantum — required to achieve a given benchmark performance level for different hardware paradigms. This work will give the Department of Defense a clearer picture of when quantum computers will deliver a practical advantage.
All benchmarking work will be supported by Orquestra, Zapata’s platform for building quantum-ready applications. Orquestra’s hardware-agnostic approach makes it the ideal platform for benchmarking the performance of different hardware backends for specific, large-scale applications.
