We introduce a problem class with two attributes crucial to the evaluation of quantum annealing processors: local ruggedness (i.e., tall, thin energy barriers in the energy landscape) so that quantum tunneling can be harnessed as a useful resource, and global frustration so that the problems are combinatorially challenging and representative of real-world inputs. We evaluate the new 2000-qubit D-Wave quantum processing unit (QPU) on these inputs, comparing it to software solvers that include both GPU-based solvers and a CPU-based solver which is highly tailored to the D-Wave topology. The D-Wave QPU solidly outperforms the software solvers: when we consider pure annealing time, the D-Wave QPU is three to four orders of magnitude faster than software solvers in both optimization and sampling evaluations.
White Paper
Quantum Annealing amid Local Ruggedness and Global Frustration