PRESS RELEASE — Rigetti Holdings, Inc. (TQI: Rigetti), a pioneer in hybrid quantum-classical computing, today announced the commercial availability of its 80-qubit quantum system, Aspen-M. The system is available today to the company’s direct and distribution customers through Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services (QCS). Rigetti also reported results of system speed tests run on Aspen-M.
“Last year we introduced the world to our proprietary multi-chip technology. We believe our approach to building quantum computers has tremendous advantages, including allowing us to meet the challenges of scaling to systems capable of solving real-world problems,” said Rigetti founder and CEO, Chad Rigetti. “Aspen-M is our first commercial system based on this multi-chip technology. Today, we are excited to make Aspen-M generally available to our customers and to release the initial results of system speed tests run on Aspen-M through our production platform.”
Aspen-M System Availability
Aspen-M is now available on Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services and will support a number of Rigetti collaborations taking place with both enterprise and public sector customers including Nasdaq, Deloitte, DARPA and the U.S. Department of Energy. Beginning today, Aspen-M will also be available to end users on Amazon Braket, marking the latest in a series of increasingly powerful Rigetti systems offered through the service since Amazon Braket’s launch in 2019. In addition, Rigetti expects the 80-qubit system to be available through Azure Quantum, Strangeworks QC™ and Zapata’s Orquestra™ platform in the coming months.
Aspen-M’s System Speed Tests
Circuit layer operations per second, or CLOPS, characterizes quantum processing speeds inclusive of gate speeds, reprogrammability, and co-processing capabilities, among other factors. Rigetti has customarily tracked gate speed as a key speed metric. CLOPS is designed to characterize how many circuits can run on a quantum computing system in a given unit of time. It leverages the quantum resources on a device to run a collection of circuits as fast as possible, while stressing all parts of the execution pipeline. CLOPS was initially developed and published by IBM in October 2021.
Rigetti reported today its results based on CLOPS for its most recent 40-qubit system, Aspen-11, and for its 80-qubit Aspen-M system. Conducting tests based on 100 shots, as set forth in the original published definition, the 40-qubit Aspen-11 system demonstrated a CLOPS of 844, while the 80-qubit Aspen-M system demonstrated a CLOPS of 892. These results suggest that current Rigetti systems perform as well or better on this CLOPS speed test as the number of qubits in the system increases. By comparison, IBM’s published CLOPS scores for systems with 5, 27, and 65 qubits were 1419, 951, and 753, respectively, as of the October 2021 publishing date.
To reflect what users can potentially expect in typical use cases, Rigetti also evaluated CLOPS using 1000 shots. In this case, Aspen-11 performed at 7512 CLOPS and Aspen-M performed at 8333 CLOPS, demonstrating that comparable or better system speed persists at both higher shot counts and higher qubit counts. These speed tests were conducted using the production Rigetti QCS environment.
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