The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced it will work with Microsoft and PsiQuantum in the validation and co-design stage of the companies’ concepts on a utility-scale quantum supercomputer.
According to Joe Altepeter, DARPA’s quantum benchmarking program manager, the agency’s evaluation team has been scrutinizing the companies’ approaches since 2023 when they were selected to develop prototypes for the DARPA program Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing, or US2QC, program.
“Now, we’re ready to evaluate their final utility-scale system designs, conduct government testing of components and hardware, and assess system-level performance capabilities of major prototypes,” Altepeter said.
Different Qubits Approaches
Both designed as error-corrected, the Microsoft and PsiQuantum utility-scale quantum computer prototypes differ in their approaches. Microsoft’s concept is based on topological qubits, while PsiQuantum’s proposal anchors on photonic qubits.
The two prototypes advanced to the validation and co-design stage after more than 50 professionals in DARPA’s test and evaluation team checked the companies’ technical approaches on fault-tolerant computing and long-term plans on R&D, architectures, systems development components and application utility.
US2QC is part of DARPA’s larger Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, both with the final goal of validating and co-designing an industrially useful quantum computer. As part of the initiative, DARPA researchers released in June pre-prints of the initial results of their effort to develop scientifically rigorous metrics that can be used to measure the impact of quantum computers on key computational challenges.