Rigetti Announces Commercial Availability of their 80 Qubit Aspen-M and a Teaming with NASDAQ to Explore Financial Applications of QC
In December, Rigetti Computing, a leading hybrid quantum-classical computing company, announced a private beta of its next-generation "Aspen-M" 80-qubit system. On February 15, Rigetti announced the general availability of the Aspen-M. The system has been launched on both Rigetti Quantum Cloud Service (QCS) and Amazon's Braket platform.
Additionally, Aspen-M will go live on Microsoft Azure Quantum, Strangeworks QC and Zapata Orquestra platforms in the coming months.
Topology of Rigetti's 80-qubit processor
Steady improvement in performance
Rigetti released several performance specs for the machine. They adopted the CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) metric proposed by IBM last year. Testing based on 100 circuit executions, according to IBM's original definition, Rigetti measured CLOPS of 844 on the 40-qubit Aspen-11 system and 892 on the 80-qubit Aspen-M-1 system. That's not too different from IBM's 850 for 127-qubit processors, 1500 for 65-qubit processors, and 2400 for 27-qubit processors.
As the number of circuit executions increased to 1000 times (consistent with typical operating conditions for QCS users), the CLOPS was 7512 on the Aspen-11 and 8333 on the Aspen-M-1. Rigetti points out that their CLOPS doesn't degrade as the machine scales, offering speeds comparable to or better than 40 qubits at the 80-qubit scale.
CLOPS of Rigetti's two quantum processors when the number of executions is 1000
In addition, Rigetti has achieved continuous improvements in coherence and fidelity, as shown in the table below (as of February 2022).
Comparison of various performance metrics of Rigetti's 40- and 80-qubit processors
Cooperation with NASDAQ
In a separate announcement, Rigetti announced that they have entered into a collaboration agreement with Nasdaq to explore quantum applications to help solve high-impact computing problems in the financial industry. The research will utilize Rigetti's QCS and 80-qubit processor.
The collaboration brings together Rigetti's scalable quantum computers and proven ability to apply quantum algorithms, as well as Nasdaq's market perspective, domain expertise and data to challenge machine learning, optimization and simulation problems.
Chad Rigetti, founder and CEO of Rigetti, said: "We believe that quantum computing has enormous potential for the financial industry, and our Aspen-M series processors can provide the necessary performance, speed and scale to help Nasdaq and others. Forward-thinking companies take quantum computing technology and apply it to critical computing problems. Nasdaq is an extremely innovative company that has been using new technologies to stay ahead and transform businesses. They are in the industry The leading position is a perfect match for us.”
Rigetti and Nasdaq will jointly evaluate financial applications that may benefit from quantum computing's ability to solve computational problems with greater precision, speed or lower cost. Potential applications include challenges in fraud detection, order matching, and risk management. The two companies will continue to develop algorithms and software with the goal of demonstrating the advantages of hybrid quantum-classical computers in solving identified problems.
To date, Rigetti has partnered with corporate and public sectors such as Microsoft, Nasdaq, Deloitte, DARPA, DOE, Strangeworks and Zapata.
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