Q-CTRL: over 99.5% of qubits sit idle in one fault-tolerant Shor's algorithm blueprint
MJBiercuk · x · 2026-10-20
A Q-CTRL blog post from the QuEra Quantum Alliance 2026 meeting argues the bottleneck to useful quantum computing is the software stack, not qubit counts.
- Yuval Baum (Q-CTRL) showed that in one fault-tolerant blueprint for Shor's algorithm, over 99.5% of qubits sit idle waiting on others; smarter software cuts errors by orders of magnitude.
- QuEra's Stefan Krastanov and Phillip Weinberg covered the compiler and simulation stack; all three talks converged on the conclusion that compilers, schedulers, calibration specs, and faithful simulators are the critical missing layer.
- Q-CTRL's Libra system targets 256 error-corrected logical qubits from 10,000+ physical qubits at a 10^-6 logical error rate, arriving on Amazon Braket in 2028, with a Gigaquop-class next-gen system planned for 2028/2029.
- Related work at the meeting included LLM-discovered quantum circuits and neutral-atom feature extraction for molecular toxicity classification on QuEra hardware.
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