Run on quantum hardware with IBM Quantum Compute Service

IBM Quantum® Compute Service, formerly called the Qiskit Runtime Service, is the cloud-based service for executing quantum computations on IBM Quantum hardware. The qiskit-ibm-runtime package is a client for that service, and is the successor to the Qiskit IBM Provider. Quantum Compute streamlines quantum computations and provides optimal implementations of the Qiskit primitive base classes for IBM Quantum hardware. To get started with IBM Quantum primitives, visit the documentation.

Quantum Compute is designed to use additional classical and quantum compute resources, including techniques such as error suppression and error mitigation, to return a higher-quality result from executing quantum circuits on quantum processors. Examples include dynamical decoupling for error suppression, and readout mitigation and zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE) for error mitigation. Learn how to configure these options on the Configure error mitigation page.

Quantum Compute also includes three types of execution modes for running your quantum program on IBM® hardware: Job, Session, and Batch, each of which have different use cases and implications for the quantum job queue. A Job is a single query to a primitive that can be run over a specified number of shots. Sessions allow you to efficiently run multiple jobs in iterative workloads on quantum computers. Batch mode allows you to submit all your jobs at once for parallel processing. Note that Open Plan users cannot submit session jobs.

To quickly install the IBM Quantum Compute client, run the following command:

pip install qiskit-ibm-runtime

See the installation page to set up a development environment for building quantum programs.

Is Quantum Compute open-source?

The short answer is, not all of it. The software that handles the technicalities of running your quantum program on an IBM Quantum device (including any error mitigation and suppression) is not open-source. However, the client software library qiskit-ibm-runtime (which is the interface for users to access IBM Quantum Compute Service), the Qiskit SDK running on the server side, and some of the software used for error mitigation, are open-source. To get involved with Qiskit open-source efforts, visit our GitHub organization at github.com/Qiskit and github.com/Qiskit-Extensions.