LANL-Developed Software Evaluates Qubits, Characterizes Noise in Quantum Annealers

LANL) High-performance computer users in the market for a quantum annealing machine or looking for ways to get the most out of one they already have will benefit from a new, open-source software tool for evaluating these emerging platforms at the individual qubit level.
“We were motivated by the need for validation and verification of quantum annealers, similar to what is currently done by organizations when they purchase a new classical supercomputer,” said Carleton Coffrin, a computer scientist and expert in artificial intelligence at Los Alamos. “They conduct acceptance testing on a huge set of benchmarks. We didn’t have good analogs for that on the quantum annealing computers. For quantum annealing, our new a Quantum Annealing Single-qubit Assessment, or QASA, protocol gives us one tool for acceptance testing.”
Coffrin is principal investigator of the project “Accelerating Combinatorial Optimization with Noisy Analog Hardware,” which developed the paper, “Single-Qubit Fidelity Assessment of Quantum Annealing Hardware.”
QASA is available as open-source software at github.com/lanl-ansi/QASA . QASA, which is executed in parallel for all qubits on a quantum annealing device, provides a detailed characterization through salient metrics about individual qubits, such as their effective temperature, noise, and bias. In the key breakthrough of this work, the single-qubit model can be executed in parallel for every qubit in a quantum annealing hardware device.