CLOPS

CLOPS (Circuit Layer Operations Per Second) is a benchmark IBM introduced to measure quantum hardware speed, specifically how many layers of parameterized circuits a system can generate, execute, and process in one second, run as part of the same protocol used to measure Quantum Volume. The two metrics are meant to be read together rather than separately: Quantum Volume measures how large and complex a circuit a system can run correctly, while CLOPS measures how fast it can iterate through many such circuits, which matters directly for variational algorithms like VQE and QAOA that submit thousands of near-identical circuits with slightly different parameters in a classical optimization loop. A high Quantum Volume with low CLOPS means a capable but slow system; runtime for hybrid workloads depends more on CLOPS than on Quantum Volume alone. IBM reports CLOPS figures alongside Quantum Volume for its own hardware generations, and the metric has seen less adoption industry-wide than Quantum Volume itself.