Overview to execution tools
Execution tools assist with running your circuits on hardware. The ISA circuits produced during transpilation can be executed using either a Sampler or Estimator primitive from Qiskit Runtime, initialized locally on your computer, from a cluster, other heterogeneous compute environment. These can be executed in a batch, which allows parallel transpilation for classical computational efficiency - or a session, which allows iterative tasks to be implemented efficiently without queuing delays. Note: Open Plan users cannot submit session jobs.
Depending on whether you are using the Sampler or Estimator primitive, the outcome of this step will be different. If using Sampler, the output will be per-shot measurements in the form of bitstrings. If using Estimator, the output will be expectation values of observables corresponding to physical quantities or cost functions.
Relevant resources
- Estimator and Sampler primitives - Handles hardware execution and returns samples or expectation values, with some built-in error suppression/mitigation support
- Execution modes - Efficiently schedule workload execution
- Directed execution model - Generate and execute circuit variants based on directives defined with Samplomatic