IBM has made its fastest quantum processor available to researchers, promising to shorten the time needed to run large and repetitive experiments.
The IBM Quantum Nighthawk r2 can run more than 100,000 quantum circuits per second. That is 25 times the rate of IBM’s Heron processors, which handle about 4,000 circuits per second.
A quantum circuit is a set of instructions given to a quantum computer. Researchers usually need to run the same circuit many times to check results because quantum calculations can be affected by errors and outside interference. Running more circuits in less time could speed up research in areas such as materials, chemistry, and physics.
Nighthawk r2 has 120 programmable qubits, the basic units used by quantum computers to process information. Its main improvement is a faster way to reset those qubits after each calculation.
Qubits must return to a clean starting state before another circuit can run. Older IBM processors measured each qubit, corrected its state when needed, and then waited for it to settle. That delay could last hundreds of microseconds, adding up across experiments that require thousands or millions of runs.
Nighthawk r2 uses a dedicated reset component for each qubit. The system quickly removes energy from the qubit and returns it to its starting state without disturbing nearby qubits. This cuts the waiting time between circuit runs to as little as one microsecond.
IBM said the cleaner starting state also reduced initialization errors by about 25 times while maintaining the accuracy of its Heron-class processors. Early tests showed that some large research workloads ran up to 10 times faster without losing accuracy.
In one neutron-scattering simulation, the processor completed work 12 times faster and produced results that researchers could compare with laboratory data in about 60 seconds.
Nighthawk r2 has also accurately handled circuits containing more than 7,500 gates. Gates are the individual operations performed during a quantum calculation. IBM considers this an important step toward running larger and more reliable quantum workloads.
The processor is also designed to support research into quantum error correction, which aims to detect and fix the errors that prevent today’s quantum computers from reliably handling complex, real-world problems.
IBM Quantum Nighthawk r2 is now available through the IBM Quantum Platform. Its higher speed could allow researchers to complete more experiments using the same amount of access time, potentially lowering one of the practical barriers to quantum computing research.