<html><body>Colloquium Speaker<br>Catherine McGeoch, Amherst College <br>Benchmarking the D-Wave 2X: Challenges and Early Results<br>Tuesday, October 20- 12:30pm<br>Computer Science 105<br><br>Benchmarking the D-Wave 2X: Challenges and Early Results<br><br>A D-Wave platform implements a quantum annealing algorithm in hardware, to solve an NP-hard problem known as Ising Model Optimization (also called Quadratic Unconstrained Boolean Optimization). The ``hardware'' is a processor chip containing qubits that exploit quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement to carry out the computation. This is a heuristic algorithm that belongs to the adiabatic quantum model of computation, an alternative to the more familiar quantum gate model of computation. <br><br>The task of performance assessment for these novel platforms -- comparing classical heuristics implemented in software to a quantum analog heuristic implemented in hardware -- gives rise to a number of new methodological issues, on top of the usual challenges relating to evaluation of heuristics for NP-hard problems. I will discuss some of these issues and present some early performance results for the D-Wave 2X, a 1000-qubit processor launched in summer 2015.<br><br><div id="9fa6274a-1b34-4f45-893b-c0a3fda3060b"><br><span name="x"></span><br></div><br></body></html>