A research collaboration led by Sandia National Laboratories, in partnership with Quantinuum and NVIDIA, has introduced the Quantum Universal Operations Performance System (QUOPS). Detailed in a multi-institution paper published on arXiv (arXiv:2609.12146) and released across public software repositories, QUOPS is an architecture-agnostic benchmarking framework designed to measure integrated quantum computer performance across both physical- and logical-qubit platforms, addressing limits in traditional component-level metrics such as raw qubit count or isolated gate fidelities.
QUOPS evaluates full system execution—incorporating compilation, error correction, syndrome decoding, and error mitigation—by executing randomized layers of arbitrary-angle single-qubit rotations, RP(θ), and CNOT gates across varying circuit widths (w) and depths. The benchmark yields two top-level system metrics: Q (QUOPS score), which defines the maximum circuit size s = 2 × w × depth successfully executed within a utility-motivated geometric volume (w² ≤ s ≤ w³) at a minimum mean process polarization threshold of 1/√e ≈ 61%; and Ω (QUOPS rate), which measures the net operational throughput in executed operations per second while accounting for sampling overheads from error mitigation or postselection.
| [ Experimental Cross-Platform QUOPS Performance Benchmarks ] | ||
|---|---|---|
| Hardware System & Modality | Architecture & Encoding Layer | QUOPS Score (Q) & Throughput (Ω) |
| Google Willow | • Physical Transmon (105 Qubits, 2D Grid) | • Q = 216 | Ω = 2.0 × 10⁷ QUOPS/s (Width w=6) |
| IBM ibm_boston | • Physical Transmon (156 Qubits, Heavy-Hex) | • Q = 204 | Ω = 3.1 × 10⁵ QUOPS/s (Width w=6) |
| Quantinuum H2-1 | • Physical Trapped-Ion (56 Qubits, QCCD) | • Q = 1,320 (1,392 w/ PS) | Ω = 353 QUOPS/s (Width w=12) |
| Quantinuum Helios-1 | • Physical Trapped-Ion (98 Qubits, QCCD) | • Q = 1,504 (1,824 w/ PS) | Ω = 303 QUOPS/s (Width w=16) |
| Quantinuum Helios-1 (FTQC) | • Logical Steane [[7,1,3]] Code (8 Logical Qubits) | • Q = 40 | Ω = 4.9 QUOPS/s (Width w=4) |
The publication provides direct cross-platform baseline measurements across leading hardware: Quantinuum’s Helios-1 achieved a physical score of Q = 1,504 (1,824 under leakage postselection), Google’s Willow achieved Q = 216 at 2.0 × 10⁷ QUOPS/s, and IBM’s ibm_boston reached Q = 204 at 3.1 × 10⁵ QUOPS/s. Additionally, the team executed QUOPS on a fully fault-tolerant logical architecture using up to 8 Steane-encoded [[7,1,3]] logical qubits on Helios-1, demonstrating logical Clifford+T circuit execution with active magic-state injection and syndrome extraction to achieve Q = 40 at Ω = 4.9 QUOPS/s.
Developed to align with federal procurement objectives—including the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Quantum Computer for Application Development and Discovery Science (QC ADDS) initiative—the framework has been integrated natively across open-source toolchains, including NVIDIA CUDA-Q, Quantinuum Guppy, TKET (pytket), and Sandia’s pyGSTi. By mapping resource requirements for canonical utility challenge problems into effective QUOPS circuit sizes—estimating targets of 270M to 370M QUOPS (Q ≈ 2.5 × 10⁸ for factoring RSA-2048 and Q ≈ 3.4 × 10⁸ for FeMoco energy eigenvalue calculations)—the framework quantifies the 5-order-of-magnitude gap remaining between contemporary hardware and utility-scale application requirements, establishing a standardized metric for government procurement, hardware roadmaps, and fault-tolerant architectural verification.
Review the technical update via Sandia National Laboratories here, access the industry announcement on Quantinuum here, examine the peer-reviewed preprint on arXiv here, and inspect open-source benchmark implementations on GitHub here.
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