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esseph

You can rent Quantum computing time from IBM cloud today:

https://www.ibm.com/quantum/products

https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/en/guides/plans-overview

I have NOT used it, but the idea is interesting.

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hello,

as always: imho (!)

i've used the ibm quantum platform together with python/qiskit during my last project - which was something like: simulate quantum-networks on "real" quantum-computers...

ibm's support, introductions / documentation anbd usability of the platform is really great.

idk ... not comparable / much better than most of the quantum-computing hardware startups i know / looked at. of course, its easy if you have "deep pockets" like ibm does ... ;))

ok, back to the quantum platform:

it had a free-tier on the "old" quantum-platform - until july 2025: 10 minutes of compute on a set of machines - back then up to 127 qubits - per month ... no identification necessary / just an email-address.

sadly this "very generous" free-tier was killed of during the transition to the all new "quantum cloud platform" during spring/summer 2025 ...

and it really works like a charm :)

just my 0.02€

You can rent it, but it's basically worthless at this stage.

there's still a long road to commercial applications but today's hardware is simulating quantum systems beyond the scale of classical methods, for example [1]; an interesting line of work opposite to this can be found in those who improve classical methods towards such examples [2], but these are only developed because of the existing quantum hardware

Really though, today's IBM hardware is good fun to play with, eg for generating moderately large GHZ states

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26845 [2]https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14887

Is there anything you can do on a rented QC that you can't do cheaper on a simulated QC on a "classical" CPU/GPU today?

No. They're a decent playground for prototyping hybrid algorithms but even that is limited. No one has yet published a hybrid algorithm on a rentable QC provider that has better benchmark performance than a modern CPU/GPU implementation.

hello,

yes ... especially if you want to execute quantum-circuits which use a lot of qubits.

why!? one approach of the simulation of quantum-computers rely on the so called "state vector" of the machine, and its memory-usage grows exponentially.

for example qiskit AER

* https://qiskit.github.io/qiskit-aer/stubs/qiskit_aer.Stateve...

just as an example:

for 32 qubits, the simulator needs 64 GB RAM

=?> double the RAM for each additional qubit

so: for 36 qubits, the simulator needs 1 TB RAM

so it gets pretty "costly" to do simulations rather quickly ...

just my 0.02€

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