Q-CTRL's Fire Opal adds IBM Nighthawk support, running a 60-qubit benchmark 12x faster than on Heron R3

Q-CTRL/Fire Opal

Fire Opal now supports IBM's Nighthawk processors. On a 60-qubit simulation of interacting electrons with about 4,500 two-qubit gates, the run took 23 seconds on Nighthawk R2 against 4 minutes 25 seconds on Heron R3, with results within 1% of the earlier baseline.

• Supported devices: Nighthawk R2 (ibm_phoenix) and Nighthawk R1 (ibm_berlin, ibm_miami).
• Q-CTRL's derived lead over the fastest classical GPU cluster rose from 36x to over 400x (company estimate).
• Fire Opal suppresses errors at run time rather than mitigating them afterwards with extra shots.