New Open-Source Software from LANL Checks Quantum Annealers

(ScienceTimes) Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed new open-source software that could evaluate quantum annealers down to the individual qubit level aside from also characterizing noise.
Usually, when institutions and organizations purchase a new piece of equipment, such as a classical supercomputer, this new item is first verified and validated. It involves running the equipment against a set of benchmarks. This drove the team of Carleton Coffrin, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert, to develop open-source software that could do a similar job, but this time for quantum annealers.
“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 said of their new project. The Los Alamos National Laboratory team published the report “Single-Qubit Fidelity Assessment of Quantum Annealing Hardware”.