Impacts of Decoder Latency on Utility-Scale Quantum Computer Architectures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The speed of a fault-tolerant quantum computer depends in large part on the reaction time of its classical electronics, that is, the total time required by decoders and controllers to determine the outcome of a logical measurement and execute subsequent conditional logical operations. Despite its importance, the reaction time and its impact on the design of a logical microarchitecture of a quantum computer are not well understood. In this work, we perform a detailed system-level analysis of the classical and quantum resource requirements of a surface code based architecture. To this end, we construct a model of the reaction time in which the decoder latency is based on parallel space- and time-window decoding methods. In addition, we draw communication latencies from our envisioned quantum execution environment, which comprises a high-speed network of quantum processing units, controllers, decoders, and high-performance computing nodes. We use this model to estimate the increase in the logical error rate of magic state injections as a function of the reaction time. We then show how the microarchitecture can be optimized with respect to the reaction time, and present full-system quantum resource estimates based on realistic hardware noise parameters for executing utility-scale quantum circuits of the Fermi-Hubbard model (2562 logical qubits and $4$$\times$$10^6$ $T$ gates) and NMR spectral prediction (241 logical qubits and $5.11$$\times$$10^{11}$ $T$ gates). We numerically determine the impact of improving reaction time on the code distance required for the core processor and on the size of the resource state factory. Moreover, we analyze how decoder speeds constrain the size of practically executable circuits, and show that state-of-the-art decoders will require a performance improvement of at least an order of magnitude to execute utility-scale quantum algorithms within days.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".