OpenQASM Simulator¶
IBM Quantum Experience features a high-performance simulator
for prototyping quantum circuits and algorithms, and exploring their
performance under realistic device noise models. The
simulator backend is called the
ibmq_qasm_simulator. The underlying code is similar to the
qasm_simulator found in
Qiskit Aer.
The ibmq_qasm_simulator allows for sampling circuits up to 32 qubits, and supports
the ability to pass a noise model
to simulate the performance of circuits under noisy device operation.
As shown in the configuration information below, the simulator allows for up to 300 circuits per job, and natively supports a wide variety of unitary and non-unitary operations.
Note that unlike the real quantum devices, where jobs are put into a queue,
IBM Quantum Experience is able to dynamically create multiple instances of the OpenQASM simulator to meet demand;
under nominal workloads there is never a wait to run on the ibmq_qasm_simulator.
Simulator timeout limit
To prevent the simulator from processing jobs that would otherwise not finish processing
in a reasonable amount of time, jobs sent to the ibmq_qasm_simulator are limited to run
times under 10,000 seconds (~2.75 hours).