Demonstrating Benefits of Quantum Upgradable Design Strategy
System Model H1-2 First to Prove 2,048 Quantum Volume
Quantinuum’s H-Series quantum computers, Powered by Honeywell, continue to deliver on exponential performance gains
Over the course of 2021, Quantinuum’s customers and collaborators were the beneficiaries of a deliberate, strategic approach to quantum computing design. Namely, that it is possible to release a generation of quantum computers that can be quickly and systematically upgraded in parallel with commercial usage, allowing customers immediate access to the latest upgrades.
With the release of the System Model H1, Powered by Honeywell, in fall 2020, Quantinuum began a real-time demonstration of its design approach. The first System Model H1, referred to as the H1-1, launched in October 2020 with a measured quantum volume of 128. Quantum volume is a metric introduced by IBM to measure the overall capability and performance of a quantum computing system regardless of technology. (Calculating quantum volume requires running a series of complex random circuits and performing a statistical test on the results.)
During 2021 Quantinuum, under its trapped-ion hardware group, previously known as Honeywell Quantum Solutions, made multiple upgrades to the H1-1 achieving measured quantum volume records of 512 in March 2021 and the 1,024 in July 2021. During that same period, Quantinuum was quietly releasing its second H1 generation quantum computer to customers and collaborators, called the H1-2. The System Model H1-2 uses the same ion-trap architecture, control system design, integrated optics, and photonics as the H1-1.
“Our H1 generation of quantum computers are nearly identical copies, with the ongoing exception that at any given time one computer might have received upgrades prior to the other,” said Dr. Russ Stutz, Head of Commercial Products for the hardware team. “Our goal is to provide users with the highest performing hardware as they work on solving real world problems."
Upgrades to both H1 quantum computers over the course of 2021 included improved gate and measurement fidelities, reduced memory errors, faster circuit compilation, inclusion of real-time classical computing resources and quantum operations using 12 qubits, versus the 10 qubits available at initial release.
What has been remarkable about the approach, is the ability to deliver near-continuous capability upgrades while being consistent on performance.
“Our customers frequently comment about their ability to reliably get expected results, including when running deep circuits and using sophisticated features like mid-circuit measurement, qubit reuse and conditional logic,” said Dr. Brian Neyenhuis, Head of Commercial Operations for the hardware team.
Just this past week, H1-2 measured a Quantum Volume of 2,048 (211), setting a new bar on the highest quantum volume ever measured on a quantum computer. The performance of the H1 generation of quantum computers continues to achieve the 10X per year increase that was announced in March 2020.
The Data
The average single-qubit gate fidelity for this milestone was 99.996(2)%, the average two-qubit gate fidelity was 99.77(9)%, and state preparation and measurement (SPAM) fidelity was 99.61(2)%. We ran 2,000 randomly generated quantum volume circuits with 5 shots each, using standard optimization techniques to yield an average of 122 two-qubit gates per circuit.
The System Model H1-2 successfully passed the quantum volume 2,048 benchmark, returning heavy outputs 69.76% of the time, which is above the 2/3 threshold with 99.87% confidence.
The plot above shows the heavy outputs for Quantinuum’s tests of quantum volume and the dates when each test passed. All tests are above the 2/3 threshold to pass the respective quantum volume benchmark. Circles indicate heavy output averages and the violin plots show the histogram distributions. Data colored in blue show system performance results and red points correspond to modeled, noise-included simulation data. White markers are the lower two-sigma error bounds.
The plot above shows the individual heavy outputs for each quantum volume 2,048 circuit. The blue line is an average of heavy outputs and the orange line is the lower two-sigma error bar which crosses the 2/3 threshold after 818 circuits, which corresponds to passing.
This is the latest in a string of accomplishments for Quantinuum, which recently announced the completion of its combination between Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum Computing to form the largest stand-alone integrated quantum computing company in the world. This news also falls on the heels of the release of Quantinuum’s flagship product, Quantum Origin, the world’s first quantum-enhanced cryptographic key generation platform.
“We look forward to continued momentum in 2022 with expected advances in multiple application areas as well as further advances in the H-Series quantum computers”, said Tony Uttley, President and Chief Operating Officer of Quantinuum.
* The Honeywell trademark is used under license from Honeywell International Inc. Honeywell makes no representations or warranties with respect to this product or service.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
For a novel technology to be successful, it must prove that it is both useful and works as described.
Checking that our computers “work as described” is called benchmarking and verification by the experts. We are proud to be leaders in this field, with the most benchmarked quantum processors in the world. We also work with National Laboratories in various countries to develop new benchmarking techniques and standards. Additionally, we have our own team of experts leading the field in benchmarking and verification.
Currently, a lot of verification (i.e. checking that you got the right answer) is done by classical computers – most quantum processors can still be simulated by a classical computer. As we move towards quantum processors that are hard (or impossible) to simulate, this introduces a problem: how can we keep checking that our technology is working correctly without simulating it?
We recently partnered with the UK’s Quantum Software Lab to develop a novel and scalable verification and benchmarking protocol that will help us as we make the transition to quantum processors that cannot be simulated.
This new protocol does not require classical simulation, or the transfer of a qubit between two parties. The team’s “on-chip” verification protocol eliminates the need for a physically separated verifier and makes no assumptions about the processor’s noise. To top it all off, this new protocol is qubit-efficient.
The team’s protocol is application-agnostic, benefiting all users. Further, the protocol is optimized to our QCCD hardware, meaning that we have a path towards verified quantum advantage – as we compute more things that cannot be classically simulated, we will be able to check that what we are doing is right.
Running the protocol on Quantinuum System Model H1, the team ended up performing the largest verified Measurement Based Quantum Computing (MBQC) circuit to date. This was enabled by our System Model H1’s low cross-talk gate zones, mid-circuit measurement and reset, and long coherence times. By performing the largest verified MBQC computation to date, and by verifying computations significantly larger than any others to be verified before, we reaffirm the Quantinuum Systems as best-in-class.
Particle accelerators like the LHC take serious computing power. Often on the bleeding-edge of computing technology, accelerator projects sometimes even drive innovations in computing. In fact, while there is some controversy over exactly where the world wide web was created, it is often attributed to Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, who developed it to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
With annual data generated by accelerators in excess of exabytes (a billion gigabytes), tens of millions of lines of code written to support the experiments, and incredibly demanding hardware requirements, it’s no surprise that the High Energy Physics community is interested in quantum computing, which offers real solutions to some of their hardest problems. Furthermore, the HEP community is well-positioned to support the early stages of technological development: with budgets in the 10s of billions per year and tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working on accelerator and computational physics, this is a ripe industry for quantum computing to tap.
As the authors of this paper stated: “[Quantum Computing] encompasses several defining characteristics that are of particular interest to experimental HEP: the potential for quantum speed-up in processing time, sensitivity to sources of correlations in data, and increased expressivity of quantum systems... Experiments running on high-luminosity accelerators need faster algorithms; identification and reconstruction algorithms need to capture correlations in signals; simulation and inference tools need to express and calculate functions that are classically intractable”
The authors go on to state: “Within the existing data reconstruction and analysis paradigm, access to algorithms that exhibit quantum speed-ups would revolutionize the simulation of large-scale quantum systems and the processing of data from complex experimental set-ups. This would enable a new generation of precision measurements to probe deeper into the nature of the universe. Existing measurements may contain the signatures of underlying quantum correlations or other sources of new physics that are inaccessible to classical analysis techniques. Quantum algorithms that leverage these properties could potentially extract more information from a given dataset than classical algorithms.”
Our scientists have been working with a team at DESY, one of the world’s leading accelerator centers, to bring the power of quantum computing to particle physics. DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national research center for fundamental science located in Hamburg and Zeuthen, where the Center for Quantum Technologies and Applications (CQTA) is based. DESY operates, develops, and constructs particle accelerators used to investigate the structure, dynamics and function of matter, and conducts a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary scientific research. DESY employs about 3,000 staff members from more than 60 nations, and is part of the worldwide computer network to store and analyze the enormous flood of data that is produced by the LHC in Geneva.
In a recent paper, our scientists collaborated with scientists from DESY, the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), and Northeastern University to explore using a generative quantum machine learning model, called a “quantum Boltzmann machine” to untangle data from CERN’s LHC.
The goal was to learn probability distributions relevant to high energy physics better than the corresponding classical models. The data specifically contains “particle jet events”, which describe how colliders collect data about the subatomic particles generated during the experiments.
In some cases the quantum Boltzmann machine was indeed better, compared to a classical Boltzmann machine. The team is analyzed when and why this happens, understanding better how to apply these new quantum tools in this research setting. The team also studied the effect of the data encoding into a quantum state, noting that it can have a decisive effect on the training performance. Especially enticing is that the quantum Boltzmann machine is efficiently trainable, which our scientists showed in a recent paper published in Nature Communications Physics.
Find the Quantinuum team at this year’s SC24 conference from November 17th – 22nd in Atlanta, Georgia. Meet our team at Booth #4351 to discover how Quantinuum is bridging the gap between quantum computing and high-performance compute with leading industry partners.
The Quantinuum team will be participating various events, panels and poster sessions to showcase our quantum computing technologies. Join us at the below sessions:
Monday, Nov 18, 8:00 - 8:25pm, EST
Panel: KAUST booth 1031
Nash Palaniswamy, Quantinuum’s CCO, will join a panel discussion with quantum vendors and KAUST partners to discuss advancements in quantum technology.
Monday, Nov 18, 9:00 - 11:59pm, EST
Beowulf Bash: World of Coca-Cola
This year, we are proudly sponsoring the Beowulf Bash, a unique event organized to bring the HPC community together for a night of unique entertainment! Join us at the event on Monday, November 18th, 9:00pm at the World of Coca-Cola.
Wednesday, Nov 20, 3:30 – 5:00pm, EST
Panel: Educating for a Hybrid Future: Bridging the Gap between High-Performance and Quantum Computing
Vincent Anandraj, Quantinuum’s Director of Global Ecosystem and Strategic Alliances, will moderate this panel which brings together experts from leading supercomputing centers and the quantum computing industry, including PSC, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, IQM Quantum Computers, NVIDIA, and National Research Foundation.
Thursday, Nov 21, 11:00 – 11:30am, EST
Presentation: Realizing Quantum Kernel Models at Scale with Matrix Product State Simulation
Pablo Andres-Martinez, Research Scientist at Quantinuum, will present research done in collaboration with HSBC, where the team applied quantum methods to fraud detection.