Fault-tolerant-era instantiations of the CLOPS framework

Develop fault-tolerant-era instantiations of the CLOPS framework that measure sustained syndrome-cycle throughput in early fault-tolerant systems and sustained logical-layer throughput in mature fault-tolerant systems, each anchored to an independently verified quality benchmark at the corresponding abstraction level.

Background

The paper presents CLOPS as a framework whose counting unit and quality anchor should evolve with the abstraction level relevant to users and algorithms. It anticipates a transition from physical-layer throughput in the utility era to syndrome-cycle throughput in the early fault-tolerant era, and subsequently to logical-layer throughput in mature fault-tolerant systems.

These future variants are not fully specified in the paper. The early fault-tolerant version would require a sustained syndrome-cycle benchmark anchored to syndrome or logical fidelity, while the mature fault-tolerant version would require a sustained logical-layer benchmark anchored to logical gate fidelity or code-distance quality.

References

The second open problem is the evolution of CLOPS itself into the fault-tolerant era. As detailed in Section~\ref{sec:future-scope}, the same design pattern that defines CLOPS anticipates further instantiations for the syndrome-cycle and logical-layer regimes---each a fresh re-instantiation of the framework rather than a refinement, just as CLOPS is a re-instantiation of CLOPS for a new regime.

— CLOPS: Benchmarking System Speed at Utility Scale  (2608.18044 - Wack, 18 Aug 2026) in Conclusion; related discussion in Section 6.5, "Future Scope and Applicability"