Benchmarking Quantum Advantage

量子计算有望彻底改变我们解决难题的能力，这些难题可能会产生巨大的经济和社会影响。量子算法的预期应用范围从破译密码协议到解决物流和金融中的复杂优化问题，以及直接应用于材料科学和药物发现的量子系统模拟等。我们需要了解量子计算在哪些问题上比现有的计算技术具有显著的优势，以及实现量子计算的潜力，这对量子计算的未来至关重要。因此，毫不奇怪，最近成立的国家量子计算中心（NQCC）的核心任务之一是了解在提供完全容错纠错量子计算的道路上的技术准备和系统性能。我们的“基准量子优势”的使命该项目旨在为我们的利益相关者提供易于部署的量子优势基准测试技术，使他们能够严格评估技术。为了实现我们的目标，我们将建立在最近的结果和主要研究者正在进行的研究的基础上，开发一个统一的理论框架，允许为经典优化中的大家族问题设计严格的量子优势基准测试工具，应用于物流和金融，以及量子优化问题，应用于化学和材料科学。我们的框架不仅允许对现有的设备和算法进行基准测试，而且还允许对未来量子计算架构的性能进行可靠的预测，适用于从今天的噪声中等规模量子NISQ硬件到容错量子计算机。首先，与当前现有的方法相反，它不需要量子电路的直接模拟，而是依赖于解的质量和沿着计算累积的误差之间的基本权衡。其次，错误的影响是至关重要的考虑，是核心的框架。到项目结束时，我们的目标是建立一个统一的框架，允许设计问题定制的基准测试，这些测试易于实现，可扩展，并且使用时几乎不需要量子计算专业知识，使其非常适合在量子意识很少的最终用户中采用。我们相信，我们的“基准量子优势”项目将使NQCC能够成功完成其使命，为解决现实世界问题的技术准备和系统性能提供指导。我们的项目，结合NQCC与爱丁堡大学信息学院“量子软件实验室”之间的合作关系，以及我们的项目目标与NQCC的准备计划SparQ的一致性，是为量子计算生态系统中的所有利益相关者提供可靠和严格的量子优势基准测试工具的理想环境。

Quantum computing promises to revolutionise our capability to solve hard problems which could incur great economic and societal impact. Expected applications of quantum algorithms range from deciphering cryptographic protocols, to solving complex optimization problems in logistics and finance, and the simulation of quantum systems with direct applications to materials science and drug discovery, among many others.To fulfil this potential, we need to understand for which problems quantum computation provides a significant advantage over currently existing computing technologies and what are the requirement to achieve the potential of quantum computing, a question of paramount importance for the future of quantum computation. It is therefore not surprising that one of the core missions of the recently created National Quantum Computing Center (NQCC) is to understand the technology readiness and systems performance on the pathway to delivering fully fault tolerant error corrected quantum computing.The mission of our "Benchmarking quantum advantage" project is to provide our stakeholders with easy to deploy quantum advantage benchmarking techniques that will allow them to rigorously assess the performance and readiness of the technology. To achieve our goal, we will build upon recent results and ongoing research by the principal investigator, developing a unified theoretical framework that allows the design of rigorous quantum advantage benchmarking tools for large families of problems in classical optimization, with applications in logistic and finance, together with quantum optimization problems, with applications in chemistry and material science. Our framework will not only allow for benchmarking existing devices and algorithms but will also allow for reliable predictions of the performance of future quantum computing architectures, applicable from todays' noisy intermediate-scale quantum NISQ hardware all the way to fault-tolerance quantum computers.Our quantum advantage benchmarking approach has two key advantages. Firstly, as opposed to currently existing approaches, it does not need the direct simulation of the quantum circuits but relies on fundamental trade-offs between the quality of the solution and the errors accumulated along the computation. Secondly, the effects of error are crucially considered and are central to the framework. By the end of the project, we aim to have built a unified framework that would allow for the design of problem-tailored benchmarking tests that are easy to implement, scalable, and require little quantum computing expertise for their use, making them ideal for its adoption among end-user with little quantum-awareness. We believe that our "Benchmarking quantum advantage" project will allow the NQCC to succeed on its mission towards providing guidance on technological readiness and system performance on solving real-world problems. Our project, combined with the partnership between NQCC and the "Quantum Software Lab" at the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh and the alignment of our project objectives with the NQCC's readiness program, SparQ, is the ideal setting to deliver reliable and rigorous quantum advantage benchmarking tools to all our stakeholders within the quantum computing ecosystem.