QPU Submission Checklist

After gaining access to IonQ’s systems and constructing your quantum circuit through the IonQ API, Qiskit, or another preferred method, you’re ready to submit a job to one of our QPUs. Before you start running on quantum hardware, we have a few recommendations to ensure that your circuits run successfully.

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Running your job on the cloud simulator

Before running your quantum circuits on real hardware, test them on our ideal simulator. As the name might suggest, this is a quantum computing simulator that provides a perfect, noise-free environment to validate your code and ensure your circuits compile and submit correctly to the IonQ Quantum Cloud.

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Running your job on the cloud simulator with noise model

To get a better idea of how your quantum circuits will perform on real hardware, we recommend running them with our noisy simulator after you’ve tested them on the ideal simulator. Our noisy simulator uses noise models based on the characteristics of our QPUs.

While these models don’t perfectly replicate every source of noise in the actual hardware, they provide a good approximation of how noise will affect your results. This can help you understand the expected behavior of your circuits and determine an appropriate number of shots for your experiments. For more detailed information about noise models and how to submit noisy simulation jobs, please refer to our guide on Simulation with Noise Models.

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Checking that you have access to the QPU

The Backends page of the IonQ Quantum Cloud Console displays all of the available QPUs and simulators. If a QPU is marked Out of Plan, you will need to request access before submitting jobs to it. You can submit an access request form or contact your IonQ representative.

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Checking the QPU status

For system availability and maintenance information, consult the IonQ Status site in addition to the Backends page. If you submit a job to a system that is not currently available, it will still go into the queue and will show as “ready” on the My Jobs page, but jobs in the queue won’t run until the system is available again.

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Checking the queue status

The Backends page of the IonQ Cloud Console shows the average time in queue for jobs that are currently waiting, and the IonQ Status site shows this average over time. This information doesn’t tell you exactly when your job will run, but it can give you a general idea of how crowded the systems are when you submit.

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Checking your project budget

The Projects page of the IonQ Cloud Console displays your current spending and total budget for each project. If your spending nears your budget limit, you may be unable to run jobs. Contact your organization’s owner to adjust project budgets as needed.

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Checking your API key and project

Each API key is tied to a specific project. If you have multiple projects, we suggest verifying that your code is using the API key for the right project. You can view the jobs submitted to a project by clicking on it from the Projects tab. This list includes simulator jobs, so if you’ve tested your code on the simulator and those jobs are showing up in the intended project, switching to a QPU backend with the same API key will keep those jobs in the same project.

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Making a reservation

If you’re running a hybrid or variational job, you may want to make a reservation to ensure that multiple circuits submitted (e.g., iterations of a variational optimization) will run consecutively rather than via the queue. You can request a reservation by emailing [email protected] with information about the target system, reservation length, and scheduling preferences.

Once you’ve confirmed that you’re ready to run on the QPU, you should be good to go! Please reach out to [email protected] or submit a ticket on support.ionq.com if you run into any problems or you have any additional questions.