2023 QCQC
Benchmarking
Contest
About the contest
QCQC Benchmarking Contest allows the community to focus on the trajectory of quantum computing by marking year-to-year progress of quantum technology on specific tasks from standard quantum chemistry.
The contest uses standard quantum chemistry problems to benchmark both the quantum algorithms and the quantum devices against experimentally validated chemical data.
Rules of the Contest
The QCQC contest intends to evaluate which combination of algorithms and quantum devices
can be used for standard quantum chemistry task.
QCQC FAQ
Who is hosting this competition?
This competition originated out of the Whitfield Lab at Dartmouth College.
What is the state of quantum computing today?
Now, companies and research groups across America, China, Australia and Europe have several quantum devices readily available via cloud access. Academic and industrial group are creating new quantum algorithms for electronic structure and quantum simulation more broadly. These disparate entities are separated by corporate protections, national interest, and attribution concerns. The project being proposed will attempt to address this lack of unification through community engagement.
Why do we need quantum benchmarking?
As commercial quantum computing proceeds, there are many end-to-end studies of quantum algorithms and benchmarks for specific devices. However, what remains is standard and systematic simulation of molecules that can be compared to standard results. The proposed contest will solve this problem by using the same standardized benchmarking and testing data used for conventional computational chemistry methods (e.g. DFT).
What is the broader impact of this conference?
This conference brings together communities and sharpens the questions of where quantum computing is heading. This serves both the quantum community as well as scientists and engineers in other fields. This contest will track year to year progress allowing the trajectory to be extrapolated. Moreover, progress on the chosen area of electronic structure advances interests in drug discovery, material science, and other fields of science.
What historical background information is relevant?
Quantum computing has been discussed for almost 40 years and, from the earliest days, the theoretical promise of quantum simulation has been a driving impetus to much of the technological development. By contrast, theoretical quantum chemistry, nearly a century old, has been driven forward by advances in algorithms and conventional computer hardware.
How does the QCQC Benchmarking Contest fit into all this?
The Quantum Chemistry on Quantum Computers Benchmarking Contest will unify these separate threads and allow the improvements of noisy intermediate scale quantum devices and the breakthroughs in algorithmic developments to be showcased in a unified framework. The results can be directly compared team-to-team as well as year-to-year.
What is the intellectual purpose of this conference?
This contest uses well-established quantum chemistry benchmarks to gauge the success of the quantum computing industry against classical computing practices. This will provide a common place for professional and academic parts of the quantum computing community to come together. The benchmarking protocols here can be extended to other problem settings besides quantum chemistry.
Code of Conduct
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