How to Build a Quantum Supercomputer: Scaling from Hundreds to Millions of Qubits
Abstract
In the span of four decades, quantum computation has evolved from an intellectual curiosity to a potentially realizable technology. Today, small-scale demonstrations have become possible for quantum algorithmic primitives on hundreds of physical qubits. Nevertheless, there are significant outstanding challenges in quantum hardware, fabrication, software architecture, and algorithms on the path towards a full-stack scalable quantum computing technology. Here, we provide a comprehensive review of these scaling challenges. We show how to facilitate scaling by adopting existing semiconductor technology to build much higher-quality qubits, employing systems engineering approaches, and performing distributed heterogeneous quantum-classical computing. We provide a detailed resource and sensitivity analysis for quantum applications on surface-code error-corrected quantum computers given current, target, and desired hardware specifications based on superconducting qubits, accounting for a realistic distribution of errors. We provide comprehensive resource estimates for several utility-scale applications including quantum chemistry calculations, catalyst design, NMR spectroscopy, and Fermi-Hubbard simulation. We show that orders of magnitude enhancement in performance could be obtained by a combination of hardware improvements and tight quantum-HPC integration. Furthermore, we introduce high-performance architectures for quantum-probabilistic computing with custom-designed accelerators to tackle today's industry-scale classical optimization, machine learning, and quantum simulation tasks in a cost-effective manner.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2411.10406,
title = {How to Build a Quantum Supercomputer: Scaling from Hundreds to Millions of Qubits},
author = {Masoud Mohseni and Artur Scherer and K. Grace Johnson and Oded Wertheim and Matthew Otten and Namit Anand and Navid Anjum Aadit and Yuri Alexeev and Gilad Ben-Shach and Kirk M. Bresniker and Kerem Y. Camsari and Barbara Chapman and Soumitra Chatterjee and Shuvro Chowdhury and Gebremedhin A. Dagnew and Tom Dvir and Aniello Esposito and Farah Fahim and Michael Ferguson and Marco Fiorentino and Archit Gajjar and Katerina Gratsea and Gaurav Gyawali and Christian Heiter and Ali H. Z. Kavaki and Abdullah Khalid and Xiangzhou Kong and Bohdan Kulchytskyy and Elica Kyoseva and Ruoyu Li and P. Aaron Lott and Igor L. Markov and Robert F. McDermott and Lucas Morais and Giacomo Pedretti and Pooja Rao and Eleanor Rieffel and Allyson Silva and John Sorebo and Panagiotis Spentzouris and Ziv Steiner and Boyan Torosov and Davide Venturelli and Robert J. Visser and Zak Webb and Xin Zhan and Yonatan Cohen and Pooya Ronagh and Alan Ho and Raymond G. Beausoleil and John M. Martinis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.10406},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
71 pages, 53 figures. General revision, added new sections, added figures, added references, added appendices