We benchmark the quantum processing units of the largest quantum annealers to date, the $$5000+$$ 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.

We benchmark the 5000+ qubit system coupled with the Hybrid Solver Service 2 released by D-Wave Systems Inc. in September 2020 by using a new class of optimization problems called garden optimization problems known in companion planting. These problems are scalable to an arbitrarily large number of variables and intuitively find application in real-world scenarios. We derive their QUBO formulation and illustrate their relation to the quadratic assignment problem. We demonstrate that the system and the new hybrid solver can solve larger problems in less time than their predecessors. However, we also show that the solvers based on the 2000+ qubit system sometimes produce more favourable results if they can solve the problems.