Title: 

Certifying, not only measuring: a UK view on benchmarking quantum computers at scale

Abstract: 

I speak from two roles: Chief Scientist of the National Quantum Computing Centre, whose testbed programme installs seven machines across five qubit modalities, and Director of the Quantum Software Lab at Edinburgh, whose QATCH programme carries the verification and benchmarking science. I will report what running research projects across these testbeds has taught us about cross-platform evaluation, and then present the technical position: benchmarks measure a device, verification certifies a computation, and only the certificate keeps scaling once systems pass the classical simulability threshold, because the randomness lives in the verifier's choices and no noise model is assumed. I will show how verification protocols compile into rigorous benchmarks with no quantum overhead, two recent hardware certificates on fault-tolerant and error-detected circuits, and the open problems where the benchmarking community can join.