Extending the Q-score to an Application-level Quantum Metric Framework

Evaluating the performance of quantum devices is an important step towards scaling quantum devices and eventually using them in practice. The great number of available quantum metrics and the different hardware technologies used to develop quantum computers complicate this evaluation. In addition, different computational paradigms implement quantum operations in different ways. A prominent quantum metric is given by the Q-score metric of Atos. This metric was originally introduced as a standalone way to benchmark devices using the Max-Cut problem. In this work, we show that the Q-score defines a framework of quantum metrics, which allows benchmarking using different problems, user settings and solvers. To showcase the applicability of the framework, we showcase a second Q-score in this framework, called the Q-score Max-Clique. This yields, to our knowledge, the first application-level metric capable of natively comparing three different paradigms of quantum computing. This metric is evaluated on these computational quantum paradigms -- quantum annealing, gate-based quantum computing, and photonic quantum computing -- and the results are compared to those obtained by classical solvers.