Benchmarking Quantum Advantage

量子计算有望彻底改变我们解决难题的能力，这些难题可能会造成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。为了实现这一潜力，我们需要了解量子计算在哪些问题上比现有计算技术具有显著优势，以及实现量子计算潜力的要求是什么，这是一个对量子计算的未来至关重要的问题。因此，最近成立的国家量子计算中心(NQCC)的核心任务之一就是了解提供完全容错纠错量子计算的过程中的技术准备和系统性能，这就不足为奇了。我们的“基准量子优势”项目的使命是为我们的利益相关者提供易于部署的量子优势基准技术，使他们能够严格评估技术的性能和准备情况。为了实现我们的目标，我们将在最近的结果和首席研究员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类问题设计严格的量子优势基准工具，这些问题在物流和金融中的应用，以及量子优化问题在化学和材料科学中的应用。我们的框架将不仅允许对现有设备和算法进行基准测试，还将允许对未来量子计算体系结构的性能进行可靠预测，从今天嘈杂的中型量子NISQ硬件到容错量子计算机。我们的量子优势基准测试方法有两个关键优势。首先，与现有的方法不同，它不需要直接模拟量子电路，而是依赖于解的质量和计算过程中累积的误差之间的基本权衡。其次，错误的影响得到了至关重要的考虑，并且是该框架的核心。到项目结束时，我们的目标是建立一个统一的框架，允许设计针对问题量身定做的基准测试，这些测试易于实施、可扩展，并且使用时不需要多少量子计算专业知识，使其成为量子意识较少的最终用户采用的理想选择。我们相信，我们的“标杆量子优势”项目将使NQCC成功地完成其使命，为解决现实世界的问题提供技术准备和系统性能方面的指导。我们的项目与NQCC和爱丁堡大学信息学学院的“量子软件实验室”之间的合作伙伴关系，以及我们的项目目标与NQCC的准备计划SPARQ的一致性，是向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.