Jülich benchmark tests the building blocks of error correction on Quantinuum, IBM and IQM hardware

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Researchers at Germany's Jülich Supercomputing Centre have tested the basic operations that quantum error correction depends on, Quantum Computing Report says. J. A. Montañez-Barrera and Kristel Michielsen looked at mid circuit measurement, reset and feed forward control across ten processors from Quantinuum, IBM and IQM. The paper is on arXiv as 2610.05928. Their benchmark is based on a quantum optimisation algorithm called LR-QAOA and used up to 2,950 mid circuit measurements per circuit

Quantinuum came out on top. Its Helios-1 and H2-1 machines had effective error rates of about 0.22% to 0.49%. They were tested on colour codes up to 91 data qubits, surface codes up to 81 and a 48 qubit qLDPC code. The report says Quantinuum's trapped ion systems demonstrated the strongest overall performance across the tested primitives

IBM's results were mixed. On its Heron processors, mid circuit measurement error remains about ten times the two qubit gate error, with effective error rates of 1.1% to 3.2%. That gap matters, because error correction relies on measuring qubits constantly in the middle of a computation. If measurement is your weak link, it drags everything else down with it

IQM had a tougher time on this particular test. According to the report, signal decay sped up beyond two data qubit chains because of conditional control and routing limits. That does not mean IQM's hardware is bad overall. It means this specific set of operations is not where its chips shine yet

One detail I liked is that the benchmark was checked against reality. On IBM's ibm_phoenix chip, the benchmark's results correlated with real logical memory results at 0.83 to 0.88. That suggests a cheap, low sampling test can predict how well a machine will do at proper error correction. Independent benchmarks like this are worth far more than vendor claims, because nobody is marking their own homework

Are you surprised Quantinuum came out ahead? And should independent benchmarks like this become standard before anyone claims error correction progress?

Jülich Supercomputing Centre Benchmark Evaluates Quantum Error Correction Primitives Across Quantinuum, IBM, and IQM Hardware - Quantum Computing Reportquantumcomputingreport.com