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This is a preview build of IBM Quantum® documentation. Refer to quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs for the official documentation.

What is Qiskit Serverless?

Qiskit Serverless provides a simple interface to run workloads across quantum-classical resources. This includes deploying programs to the IBM Quantum® Platform and running workloads remotely, as well as easy resource management for multi-cloud and quantum-centric supercomputing use cases.

Premium users can build, deploy, and run their workloads remotely on classical compute made available through IBM Quantum Platform.

Tip

Qiskit Serverless is getting an upgrade, and its features are changing fast. During this development phase, find release notes and the most recent documentation at the Qiskit Serverless GitHub page.

Note

This is an experimental feature available only for IBM Quantum Premium Plan, Flex Plan, and On-Prem (via IBM Quantum Platform API) Plan users.

When should I use Qiskit Serverless?

Qiskit Serverless helps manage classical and quantum resources across the entire Qiskit patterns workflow. This includes some of the following examples:

  • Parallelizing classical tasks, such as pre-processing and post-processing
  • Persisting long-running workloads in the cloud, even if your laptop is turned off
  • Deploying reusable programs

What is included?

The following compute resources are included by default in the Qiskit Serverless environment. Users can contact support to increase any of these.

  • 16 vCPU cores
  • 64GB RAM
  • Maximum of two active jobs per user at any one time

Install Qiskit Serverless

To use Qiskit Serverless on IBM Quantum Platform, install the following packages:

pip install qiskit-ibm-catalog qiskit_serverless

qiskit_ibm_catalog provides the client-side tools to upload and run remote programs, while qiskit_serverless provides server-side tools to distribute compute and manage data. These packages require python 3.11+. For users and organizations who want to run Qiskit Serverless on custom infrastructure, follow the Cloud infrastructure setup guide.

Tip

Currently, the IBM Quantum workloads table only reflects Qiskit Runtime workloads. Use job.status() to see your Qiskit Serverless workload's current status. Find an example in the Run your first Qiskit Serverless workload remotely guide.

Next steps

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