In April 2021, we reported that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had announced funding opportunities were available for a Quantum Benchmarking program and was soliciting proposals for it. The program has goals to create new benchmarks that quantitatively measure progress towards specific computational challenges and also attempt to define the computer hardware necessary to measure benchmark performance. It has now announced that it is awarded contracts to Raytheon BBN, University of Southern California (USC), and a team of five organizations including Aalto University, IonQ, University of Technology Sydney, University of Texas at Dallas, and Zapata Computing. The Raytheon BBN contract was for $2.9 million, the USC contract was for $4.1 million, and the amount for the five member team has not yet been announced. Additional information about the Raytheon BBN and USC awards is available here and a news release from Zapata about their participation in the award can be found here.
April 2, 2022