Use Experiments with Runtime sessions

Problem

You want to run experiments in a Runtime session so that jobs can run in close temporal proximity.

Solution

Note

This guide requires qiskit-ibm-runtime version 0.15 and up, which can be installed with python -m pip install qiskit-ibm-runtime. For how to migrate from the older qiskit-ibm-provider to qiskit-ibm-runtime, consult the migration guide.

Use the IBMBackend object in Qiskit Runtime API Docs Preview, which supports sessions.

In this example, we will set the max_circuits property to an artificially low value so that the experiment will be split into multiple jobs that run sequentially in a single session. When running real experiments with a large number of circuits that can’t fit in a single job, it may be helpful to follow this usage pattern:

from qiskit_ibm_runtime import QiskitRuntimeService
from qiskit_experiments.library.tomography import ProcessTomography
from qiskit import QuantumCircuit

service = QiskitRuntimeService(channel="ibm_quantum")
backend = service.backend("ibm_osaka")
qc = QuantumCircuit(1)
qc.x(0)

backend.open_session()
exp = ProcessTomography(qc)
# Artificially lower circuits per job, adjust value for your own application
exp.set_experiment_options(max_circuits=3)
exp_data = exp.run(backend)
# This will prevent further jobs from being submitted without terminating current jobs
backend.close_session()

Note that runtime primitives are not currently supported natively in Qiskit Experiments, so the backend.run() path is required to run experiments.