Benchmarking Quantum Computing Applications with Zapata's Orquestra for the US Department of Defense

The customer in this case study is the US Department of Defense, specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is a government agency that is responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. They are interested in understanding the future utility of quantum computers and how to quantify the advantage they offer over classical computers. They are funding Zapata to develop application-specific benchmark tests to compare the performance of different quantum hardware backends and estimate the hardware resources required for different quantum applications.

The US Department of Defense, specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is keen on understanding the future utility of quantum computers. Quantum computers promise an exponential advantage over classical computers, but quantifying this advantage for solving computationally hard problems remains unclear. The challenge also lies in determining when exactly this advantage could be realized. To address this, DARPA is funding Zapata to develop application-specific benchmark tests to compare the performance of different quantum hardware backends. Additionally, DARPA is interested in estimating the hardware resources that will be required for different quantum applications.

In response to the challenge, Zapata received an award from the US Government in 2022 to develop software tools for quantum benchmarking. As part of the award, Zapata is collaborating with partners in enterprise, academia, and technology to create hardware-agnostic benchmarks to quantify computational utility. The company will determine the resources, both classical and quantum, required to achieve a given benchmark performance level for different hardware paradigms. This work aims to provide the Department of Defense with a clearer picture of when quantum computers will deliver a practical advantage. All benchmarking work will be supported by Orquestra, Zapata’s platform for building quantum-ready applications. Orquestra’s hardware-agnostic approach makes it the ideal platform for benchmarking the performance of different hardware backends for specific, large-scale applications.