Benchmarking Advantage and D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealers with exact cover problems

We benchmark the quantum processing units of the largest quantum annealers to date, the $$5000+$$ qubit quantum annealer Advantage and its 2000+ qubit predecessor D-Wave 2000Q, using tail assignment and exact cover problems from aircraft scheduling scenarios. The benchmark set contains small, intermediate, and large problems with both sparsely connected and almost fully connected instances. We find that Advantage outperforms D-Wave 2000Q for almost all problems, with a notable increase in success rate and problem size. In particular, Advantage is also able to solve the largest problems with 120 logical qubits that D-Wave 2000Q cannot solve anymore. Furthermore, problems that can still be solved by D-Wave 2000Q are solved faster by Advantage. We find, however, that D-Wave 2000Q can achieve better success rates for sparsely connected problems that do not require the many new couplers present on Advantage, so improving the connectivity of a quantum annealer does not per se improve its performance.