USRA-Rigetti-NASA Start Work on DARPA ONISQ Phase 2

In March of 2020, we reported on an award from the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to a team from the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), Rigetti Computing and NASA for work on a program called ONISQ (Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices). The goal of ONISQ is to research how NISQ level quantum computers can be used to provide an advantage in solving optimization problems. This activity has been quite productive as there has already been more than ten scientific papers, published or presented at international conferences or currently under review. The team has now advanced work to start on Phase 2 of this program which entails testing applications of increasing scale and benchmarking the solutions against high-performance classical computers to see if the quantum approach can provide an advantage. The Phase 2 work will include the use of Rigetti's recently announced 80 qubit processor. More about the Phase 2 activity of this ONISQ program is available in a news release provided by Rigetti which you can see here and another news release from USRA which is available here.

January 27, 2022