Pegasus: The second connectivity graph for large-scale quantum annealing hardware

TL;DR

Pegasus is a new connectivity graph for quantum annealing hardware that significantly improves qubit interconnections over the previous Chimera graph, enabling more complex quantum computations.

Contribution

This paper introduces Pegasus, the first major redesign of quantum annealer connectivity graphs since 2009, with an algorithm for defining and visualizing its structure.

Findings

Pegasus offers increased qubit connectivity compared to Chimera.

Open source code for visualizing Pegasus is provided.

Various visualizations reveal different properties of the graph.

Abstract

Pegasus is a graph which offers substantially increased connectivity between the qubits of quantum annealing hardware compared to the graph Chimera. It is the first fundamental change in the connectivity graph of quantum annealers built by D-Wave since Chimera was introduced in 2009 and then used in 2011 for D-Wave's first commercial quantum annealer. In this article we describe an algorithm which defines the connectivity of Pegasus and we provide what we believe to be the best way to graphically visualize Pegasus in order to see which qubits couple to each other. As supplemental material, we provide a wide variety of different visualizations of Pegasus which expose different properties of the graph in different ways. We provide an open source code for generating the many depictions of Pegasus that we show.