A useful application for 127-qubit quantum computing processors with error mitigation.
Quantum Utility: IBM Quantum and UC Berkeley experiment charts path to useful quantum computing For weeks, researchers at IBM Quantum and UC Berkeley were taking turns running increasingly complex physical simulations. Youngseok Kim and Andrew Eddins, scientists with IBM Quantum, would test them on the 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle processor. UC Berkeley's Sajant Anand would attempt the same calculation using state-of-the-art classical approximation methods on supercomputers located at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Purdue University. They'd check each method against an exact brute-force classical calculation. Eagle returned accurate answers every time. And watching how both computational paradigms performed as the simulations grew increasingly complex made both teams feel confident the quantum computer was still returning answers more accurate than the classical approximation methods, even in the regime beyond the capabilities of the brute force methods. "The level of agreement between the quantum and classical computations on such large problems was pretty surprising to me personally," said Eddins. "Hopefully it's impressive to everyone." The two were collaborating to test whether today's noisy, error-prone quantum computers were useful for calculating accurate results for certain kinds of problems. And today, they've published the results1 of that research on the cover of Nature. IBM Quantum and UC Berkeley have presented evidence that noisy quantum computers will be able to provide value sooner than expected, all thanks to advances in IBM Quantum hardware and the development of new error mitigation methods. The journal Nature featured the article "Evidence for the use of quantum computing before fault tolerance" on the cover of their June 15, 2023 issue. This work excites us for a lot of reasons. It's a realistic scenario using currently available IBM Quantum processors to explore meaningful computations and realistic applications before the era of…