Benchmarking Advantage and D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealers with exact cover problems

Abstract

We benchmark the quantum processing units of the largest quantum annealers to date, the 5000+ qubit quantum annealer Advantage and its 2000+ qubit predecessor D-Wave 2000Q, using tail assignment and exact cover problems from aircraft scheduling scenarios. The benchmark set contains small, intermediate, and large problems with both sparsely connected and almost fully connected instances. We find that Advantage outperforms D-Wave 2000Q for almost all problems, with a notable increase in success rate and problem size. In particular, Advantage is also able to solve the largest problems with 120 logical qubits that D-Wave 2000Q cannot solve anymore. Furthermore, problems that can still be solved by D-Wave 2000Q are solved faster by Advantage. We find that D-Wave 2000Q can only achieve better success rates for a few very sparsely connected problems.

Statistical quality assessment of Ising-based annealer outputs

“…Reformulation of this question, i.e., the estimation of the success probability of having a ground state in the sample, has also been addressed in the literature of benchmarking, see e.g. [15,16,17]. In benchmark scenarios, at least at the present state of the art, the addressed optimization problems are specifically designed, i.e.…”