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IBM Quantum Innovation Center at NC State
Quantum Updates

Quantum Updates

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0282024-11-13new 156Q Heron R2 quantum computerWe have released a new 156Q Heron R2 quantum computer, ibm_marrakesh. This quantum computer has been added to your Hub at the Hub level. Admin must distribute the system down to the Project level for collaborators to gain access. If your project does not have access, you can request access by sending email to quantumcomputing@ncsu.edu.
0272024-11-7addition of a new feature as well as the removal of an old oneWe’re writing today to announce the addition of a new feature as well as the removal of an old one. Starting with ibm_torino, we are rolling out the addition of new basis gates to the Heron Instruction Set Arhchitecture (ISA) over the next two weeks. These new gates offer continuously parameterized single-qubit (rx) and two-qubit (rzz) instructions implemented with a single control pulse.

With rx gates, all single-qubit rotations (u3) can be achieved with a single control pulse, rather than being decomposed into two sx gates and three rz gates. This reduces the duration and error for single-qubit gates by up to a factor of two.

Similarly, with rzz gates, this avoids a decomposition into multiple cz gates for a common operation in time evolution circuits.

These new gates are not compatible with some of the existing technology for error mitigation and dynamic circuits in the Qiskit Runtime. Support for optimizing circuits to take advantage of rzz gates within the Qiskit SDK transpiler is also limited. Consequently, users must opt-in to receiving a backend object that includes these fractional gates in the backend Target. Please see the docs for more information.

Adding such fractional gates to the ISA of IBM quantum processors was the predominant use case described by users for use of pulse-level control. Now that support for these gates is built-in, we are announcing the deprecation of pulse-level control on all IBM Quantum processors. We plan to remove such support on Feb 3, 2025. The pulse module is also scheduled for removal in Qiskit SDK 2.0. For those users that were using pulse-level support to investigate optimal control techniques, we encourage you to check out the qiskit-dynamics (docs) package to facilitate ongoing numerical investigations.

Regards,
IBM Quantum
0262024-04-16Deprecation of the legacy backend.run() interfaceHello IBM Quantum Network,

We have deprecated the legacy backend.run() interface in Qiskit Runtime. The backend.run() interface originally coexisted with the original (V1) primitives model as the dedicated “direct hardware access” entry point. With the introduction of the V2 primitives interface, the new SamplerV2 class now fulfills that role.

Support for backend.run() will officially be dropped on or around 15 October 2024. Please refer to this migration guide for instructions on how to migrate any existing code that uses backend.run() to the new V2 primitives interface.
0242024-04-01We have retired ibmq_kolkata and ibmq_mumbaiWe have retired ibmq_kolkata and ibmq_mumbai.

These systems will no longer accept new jobs.

If you would like to retrieve job data from your past jobs, please refer to the following documentation
0232024-03-22Focus on utility-scale computing: Retirement of cloud simulators and IBM Quantum LabCloud simulators


In line with our focus on utility-scale quantum computing, we’re retiring our cloud simulators on 15 May 2024. We invite you to start using the Qiskit Runtime local testing mode (with qiskit-ibm-runtime 0.22.0 or later), which makes it possible to perform development and testing locally prior to submitting your workloads to our >100-qubit systems.


This change emphasizes a shift toward quantum hardware capabilities, since the benefits of quantum hardware have surpassed the utility of simulators in helping determine which applications have the greatest potential for advantage.

Guide: Migrate from cloud simulators to local simulators.

Noisy simulation with Qiskit Aer primitives.

Getting started with Qiskit Aer.

Leverage IBM Watson Studio as an alternative to your local environment.
IBM Quantum Lab

We are also retiring IBM Quantum Lab on 15 May 2024 to increase our focus on utility-era tooling.

You can execute jobs locally with Qiskit, or you can set up your own cloud-based environment.

Starting today, you can download your Lab files in bulk from the Lab platform. Bulk file downloads will remain available until 15 November 2024.
0222024-03-06Qiskit SDK 1.0 is here!Qiskit SDK 1.0 is our way of marking the start of a new era for programming quantum computers — one that is centered on performance, stability, and usability. But what does this mean exactly? We’ve made a variety of changes over the past few releases to prepare for this, including:

A more performant SDK: We’ve spent years working to improve Qiskit’s overall performance, and this release represents the accumulation of many different improvements over the past 18 months. Qiskit 1.0 will enable users to easily build and transpile circuits with 100+ qubits, and lays the groundwork for future 1,000+ qubit workloads.

A stable API: With the launch of Qiskit 1.0, we are beginning a new, more stable release cycle and updating our versioning support. Get ready for significantly fewer breaking changes and much more robust backwards-compatibility and bug support than users have ever had before!

A leaner set of libraries: We’ve consolidated and focused the core features of Qiskit by removing the metapackage architecture and splitting out several modules into separate packages. This allows us to focus much more on stability and maintainability while enabling the wider open source community to contribute interesting new features. You’ll find more details on why and how we made this decision in our migration guide.

An SDK built for an open-source ecosystem: The transpiler plugin interface and the broader Qiskit Ecosystem program are designed to encourage scientists, engineers and software developers to try their hand at building new extensions of Qiskit’s core capabilities, so we can all work together to advance the field of quantum computing.

Many more features and improvements have come with the release of Qiskit 1.0, such as a redesign of the Sampler and Estimator primitives, native OpenQASM 3 support, and hefty memory and performance improvements. We highly recommend reading through the Qiskit 1.0 Release Summary to learn about all of the exciting changes that Qiskit 1.0 brings.
0212024-03-05Updates to IBM Quantum Platform Administration AnalyticsAt IBM, we strive to provide industry-leading experiences in quantum computing. Today, we are enriching the Administration Analytics Dashboard on IBM Quantum Platform with new visual features, to help Hub Administrators monitor their organization’s reserved capacity and usage with ease.

Visible for only Hub and Group Administrators, upgrades to the Administration views include:

Total contracted reserve capacity displayed in minutes. Premium Plan contracts express reserved capacity in units of Queue Slots (or system share), which corresponds to a number of usable minutes that varies over time. Now, the analytics dashboard represents your Queue Slots with a fixed conversion rate of 1600 minutes per Queue Slot over a 28-day rolling window. This conversion reflects our working target for IBM Quantum systems’ availability to process user workloads. Representing Queue Slots as a more stable reference helps your administrators to better monitor and manage reserved capacity and usage. Please note, this does not change the contract definition of Queue Slots, nor your contracted reserved capacity.

Enriched usage plots through the overlay of contracted reserved capacity and usage. This new visual aid enables enhanced usage monitoring across your Hub and Groups.

New visual aids to identify Groups and Projects that have reached a state of over-usage. This will aid administrators to take action to either modify their capacity allotment or to request lowering their system usage.

Updated Group, and Project capacity management to show minutes in addition to shares. This permits administrators to more clearly and quantifiably determine the desired partition of the available reserved capacity. At this time, Groups continue to uniquely inherit the assigned reserved capacity, while Projects partake in the reserved capacity inherited by their respective Group according to the Project’s relative priority and usage.

We hope you will enjoy these improvements, and we look forward to see how Administrators will use the new insights that these updates unlock.

Want to learn more? Check out the Analytics Dashboard Documentation
0202024-02-28IBM retiring remaining Falcon systemsIBM notes: In keeping with our commitment towards utility-scale systems, IBM will be retiring the remaining Falcon systems, ibm_algiers, ibm_cairo, and ibm_hanoi, on or around April 30.
0192024-02-23Changes how start times happen in Qiskit RuntimeOnce these systems are retired, they will no longer accept or process jobs. We suggest retrieving any job data from important past jobs before the systems are retired. Please refer to the following documentation for more information on retrieving past jobs.
0182024-02-14Changes to Qiskit Runtime PrimitivesLast year we introduced Qiskit Patterns as the four-step archetype for how to use quantum systems. In step 2, circuits and observables are prepared to efficiently run on quantum hardware. This step ensures that users don’t incur unnecessary costs when making Primitive (Sampler or Estimator) queries, because (potentially unbounded-cost) classical computations are done on the client side. To further encourage this mode of operation, beginning 1 March 2024, Qiskit Runtime will require that circuits and observables are transformed to use only instructions supported by the system (referred to as instruction set architecture (ISA) circuits and observables) before being submitted to the primitives. This change also streamlines service operations to produce faster results and make more efficient use of our fleet of quantum systems. See the transpilation documentation for instructions to transform circuits and the primitive examples to see this coupled with operator transformations. Due to this change, the primitives will no longer perform layout or routing operations; consequently, transpilation options referring to those tasks will no longer have any effect. Users can still request that the Primitives skip optimization of input circuits via options.transpilation.skip_transpilation.
0172024-02-02Retiring ibm_kolkata & ibm_mumbaiRetiring ibm_kolkata and ibm_mumbai on or around 4/1/2024. We suggest retrieving any past jobs before the systems are retired.
0162023-12-01New 133 qubit backend addedWe are pleased to announce that we have released our first IBM Quantum system based on a Heron quantum processor, the 133-qubit ibm_torino. Leveraging signal delivery innovations from Osprey, Heron delivers the performance of an Egret at the scale of an Eagle. Specifically, using the tunable coupler architecture first demonstrated on ibm_prague, ibm_torino achieves our best score yet on the new layer fidelity benchmark, an EPLG of 0.8% across a 100-qubit chain. At the level of individual two-qubit gates, the median error of 0.35% eclipses the previous best on a 100Q+ system by nearly a factor of two, while shrinking the median gate time to a mere 124 ns, roughly a factor of four faster than on a typical Eagle. Note that in contrast to the directional ECR and CX gates used on Eagle and older systems, the native two-qubit gate here is a controlled-Z (CZ) rotation, which is inherently symmetric between the two qubits, simplifying the task of mapping circuits onto physical qubits. Heron will also serve as the foundation on which we’ll follow our updated development roadmap. The first introduction of IBM Quantum System Two will feature a collection of three Heron quantum processors. We’re referring to Heron as the most performant quantum processor in the world and it will be the technological path forward as we further drive our roadmap through this Era of Utility towards quantum computing at scale.
0152023-11-30New 127 qubit backend addedpleased to announce that a new system with 127 qubits, ibm_osaka, is now accessible through your Hub. For more details on the system's specifications
0142023-11-29New URLs for IBM Quantum PlatformWithin the upcoming days, IBM Quantum Platform will find a new home on the domain https://quantum.ibm.com/. Documentation will be on https://docs.quantum.ibm.com/, Learning on https://learning.quantum.ibm.com/, and Administration on https://quantum.ibm.com/admin. All previous URLs will redirect to the new ones, but you will have to re-authenticate. We hope this new URL is easier to remember and share!
0132023-11-28Retire immediately nairobi,lagos, perthToday, IBM has retired ibm_nairobi, ibm_lagos, and ibm_perth as part of our transition towards utility scale systems with more than 100 qubits. These systems will no longer accept or process jobs. Any jobs that were queued on these systems have been flushed out of the queue and will not return results.
0122023-11-23New 127 qubit backend addeda new 127 qubit machine, ibm_kyoto has been added for use
0112023-11-02New capabilities from Middleware for QuantumWe are excited to release today new capabilities from Middleware for Quantum, in beta release. Starting today, you will have additional tools as part of Quantum Serverless to build quantum classical workflows and manage their execution on heterogeneous compute resources. As part of this beta release, Premium clients will have access to classical compute for remote execution of workloads, easy distribution and parallelization of tasks, compatibility with Qiskit Runtime Primitives and sessions, support for third-party Python packages, and ability to work with multiple files.These capabilities will be replacing Qiskit Runtime custom programs, which will be deprecated on November 2, and which we plan to remove on or around November 27.
0102023-11-10ibm_auckland has been retired effective immediatelyibm_auckland will no longer accept or process jobs. Any jobs that were queued on this system have been flushed out of the queue and will not return results.
0092023-11-2023New release of Middleware for Quantum (beta)We are excited to release today new capabilities from Middleware for Quantum, in beta release. Starting today, you will have additional tools as part of Quantum Serverless to build quantum classical workflows and manage their execution on heterogeneous compute resources. As part of this beta release, Premium clients will have access to classical compute for remote execution of workloads, easy distribution and parallelization of tasks, compatibility with Qiskit Runtime Primitives and sessions, support for third-party Python packages, and ability to work with multiple files.These capabilities will be replacing Qiskit Runtime custom programs, which will be deprecated on November 2, and which we plan to remove on or around November 27.
0082023-10-30System maintenance outages Nov 1-3We will be upgrading some of our infrastructure security between November 1st and November 3rd. Each of our systems will experience two or more interruptions of services during this period.
0072023-10-27IBM guadalupe has been retired effective immediatlyThis system will no longer accept or process jobs. Any jobs that were queued on the system have been flushed out of the queue and will not return results.
0062023-10-16IBM to retire the current Qilskit Runtime 11-27-2023To bring you with us on that evolutionary path we are upgrading our Qiskit Runtime custom programs. We will announce more details about the new upgraded functionality on November 1st. At this time we just wanted to inform you that as a result of this upgrade, the current Qiskit Runtime custom programs will be retired on or around November 27
0052023-10-09IBM changes QIC support team's emailIBM quantum support team's email to ibmquantum@ibm.com. This is for tuture questions, issues adn feedback to IBM regarding quantum system and services
0042023-09-07433 qubit ibm_seattle was retired ibm_seattle was available to our users for a limited time, it was a key technology demonstrator. Thanks to ibm_seattle, we were able to successfully demonstrate high-density signal delivery (and cooling thereof), large chip/package sizes, and high-density room-temperature electronics at scale, as well as compiler and other software stack enhancements, which is all important data that will be fed forward to our future systems. Seattle has been retired and at a date to be announced in December '23 a new system with the Heron chip will be added to the QIC users
0032023-10-03Systems being retired ibm_hanoi and ibm_auckland on or around November 9th, 2023.
0022023-09-27Reservable systems decreasedWith the retirement of backends yesterday, only 3 systems are still reservable: lagos (7 qubit), perth (7 qubit) and kolkata (27 qubit). Once these systems are deprecated, the reservation capability will disappear
0012023-09-26Backends retiredToday, ibmq_lima, ibmq_belem, ibmq_quito, ibmq_manila, and ibmq_jakarta have been retired as part of our transition towards utility scale systems with more than 100 qubits. ibmq_guadalupe will remain online for a few additional days, and we will send an additional announcement once it has retired as well.