Introduction to Q-CTRL and Qiskit Runtime primitives
An overview of how Q-CTRL performance management works with the building blocks of Qiskit Runtime
Qiskit Runtime is a quantum computing service and programming model offered by IBM to build, optimize, and execute workloads at scale using Qiskit.
One of the main benefits of Qiskit Runtime is managed performance, which enables users to easily apply cutting-edge methods to optimize hardware performance. Q-CTRL Embedded is a performance management strategy offered at no additional cost on Qiskit Runtime instances on IBM Cloud.
By choosing the Q-CTRL performance management strategy, your circuit execution is optimized behind-the-scenes via a full pipeline of error suppression and mitigation techniques, which have been benchmarked to improve performance by up to 9,000x.
Qiskit Runtime primitives and Q-CTRL
In Qiskit Runtime, primitives are building blocks that allow you to perform common quantum computing workloads at a higher level of abstraction. They provide an interface to build modular algorithms and return information beyond counts.
The following primitives are available:
| Primitive | Description |
|---|---|
| Sampler | Calculates probabilities or quasi-probability distributions of bitstrings from quantum circuits. Quasi-probability distributions are similar to regular probabilities, except they may include negative values, which can occur when using certain error mitigation techniques. |
| Estimator | Computes expectation values of observables with respect to states prepared by quantum circuits. Users generally specify a list of circuits, observables, and possibly some additional configuration, with which the program can efficiently evaluate expectation values and variances. |
Once Q-CTRL performance management is configured, you don't need to change anything about the way you interact with primitives. Behind the scenes, Q-CTRL's error suppression and mitigation will augment the primitives to improve runtime execution.
Next, try running some examples using the primitives with your Q-CTRL-enabled Qiskit Runtime instance.
