IBM Quantum¶

OpenQAOA supports all gate-based QPUs present on IBMQ Experience. OpenQAOA also supports remote simulators like the ibmq qasm simulator and statevector simulator. For the latest list of available QPUs and simulators, log into your IBMQ Experience account here. Once logged in, click on the navigation menu icon on the top left and go to "Compute Resources".

Currently, some available simulators are:

Name	Qubits	Processor-type	Plan
ibmq_qasm_simulator	32	General, Context Aware	open
simulator_statevector	32	Schrödinger wavefunction	open

Info

QPUs classified under the "Premium" plan requires paid access. For free-tiered QPUs, use QPUs that are classified as "open".

How to connect to IBMQ¶

There are two ways to access the devices on IBMQ:

Access through your own laptop¶

In order to access IBMQ devices through your local computer, you will need to retrieve your IBMQ API Token. Your account API Token can be found on your IBMQ account page here

OpenQAOA utilizes the Qiskit library to authenticate with IBMQ. As such, the user is first required to save his API Token, locally, through Qiskit.

Danger

Since Qiskit requires the API Tokens to be used for programmatic access. Be cautious about where you expose your code. If leaked, they may compromise your IBMQ account.

from qiskit_ibm_provider import IBMProvider

IBMProvider.save_account('YOUR_API_TOKEN')

OpenQAOA then loads and authenticates the saved API Token via Qiskit.

Access through IBMQ hosted notebooks¶

You can also use the hosted notebooks on IBMQ Experience with OpenQAOA. Just install openqaoa using pip install openqaoa in the terminal in Quantum Lab. Once installed, the steps to running a computation in the Quantum Lab is the same as when running OpenQAOA from your own laptop.

Creating an IBMQ Device¶

An IBMQ Device can be created by the following:

from openqaoa import QAOA, create_device

q = QAOA()

qasm_sim_device = create_device(location='ibmq', 
                                name='ibmq_qasm_simulator',
                                hub='ibm-q', 
                                group='open', 
                                project='main')

q.set_device(qasm_sim_device)

Find an available Device¶

If you are unsure about what devices are available to you, you can do the following:

from openqaoa import create_device

q_device = create_device(location='ibmq', 
                        name='', hub='ibm-q', 
                        group='open', project='main')

q_device.check_connection()
q_device.available_qpus

The attribute check_connection authenticates your IBMQ credentials while available_qpus returns a list of IBMQ devices that are available to your IBMQ account, based on your API Token.

Once you've selected the desired device, recreate the device object with the selected device's name as name in the create_device function.