Set up your IBM Cloud account - invited users

If you do not have an invitation from an administrator to join an account, follow the steps in Set up your IBM Cloud account instead.

You can run workloads on IBM® quantum processing units (QPUs) by setting up an account on IBM Cloud®. You will also need to install and set up Qiskit and Qiskit Runtime.

Your user account is associated with one or more instances, identified by Cloud Resource Names (CRNs) that give access to IBM Quantum services. Additionally, a unique API token (also called a key) is assigned to each account, allowing for IBM Quantum access from Qiskit. For instructions to choose a specific instance, see Connect to an instance.

Set up to use IBM Cloud

Before you begin

1. Accept the email invitation.

2. Log in with an IBMid or Google account. If you don't have one, you are guided through creating one. After logging in, confirm your information and accept the invitation to join the account.

3. Navigate back to IBM Quantum Platform.

4. Make sure that the correct account and region are selected in the account switcher in the header, as shown in the following image.

   • Choose the account that was invited in the email.
   • The region controls where your jobs are run and where the job data is kept. You can access either region by using the same API key, but you can only see and access the instances that were created in the region that you're logged in to.

   

1. Find your access credentials

1. Find your API key. From the dashboard, create your API key, then copy it to a secure location so you can use it for authentication.
2. Optional: Find the instance you want to use from the Instances page. Click the icon to copy its CRN, then save it in a secure location so you can use it to identify the instance.

2. Connect Qiskit with your service instance

If you are working in a trusted Python environment (such as on a personal laptop or workstation), use the save_account() method to save your credentials locally, then use them to initialize the service.

1. Ensure you are working in an active Python environment with the Qiskit SDK and Qiskit Runtime installed.

2. Activate the Python virtual environment, run Python in your virtual environment, and enter the following:

   token = "<your-API-token>"

3. Initialize the service.

  from qiskit_ibm_runtime import QiskitRuntimeService
  service = QiskitRuntimeService.save_account(
    token=token, # Your token is confidential.
    # Do not share your key in public code.
    instance="<IBM Cloud CRN or instance name>", # Specify the instance to use.
    set_as_default=True, # Set these as your default credentials.
  )

  from qiskit_ibm_runtime import QiskitRuntimeService
 
# If you named your credentials, optionally specify the name here, as follows:
# QiskitRuntimeService(name='account-name')
# If you don't specify a name, the default credentials are loaded.
service = QiskitRuntimeService()

• If you have saved credentials for both an IBM Quantum Platform account and an IBM Cloud account, IBM Cloud is the default account used when you initialize your account, unless you specify set_as_default=True in your IBM Quantum Platform account when you use the save_account() method.
• If you are saving multiple accounts, consider using the name parameter to differentiate them.
• Credentials are saved to $HOME/.qiskit/qiskit-ibm.json. Do not manually edit this file.
• If you don't save your credentials, you must specify them every time you start a new session.

Next steps