Improve performance and usability of BasicAer
Opened this issue · 4 comments
Description
Qiskit includes a Numpy simulator backend called BasicAer. It suffers from issues in several areas, including performance, usability, and documentation. This project aims to address those issues.
Deliverables
Fix the following issues:
Mentors details
- Mentor 1
- Name: Kevin Sung
- GitHub ID: @kevinsung
- What they do: Qiskit Researcher
Number of mentees
1
Type of mentees
- Mentee 1
- Required:
- Knowledge of Python and Qiskit
- Nice to have:
- Experience in quantum circuit simulation
- Required:
This project now has a mentee: @alejomonbar
Checkpoint 2
At this point, I have two pull requests with one of them merged. These pull requests solve some problems for the BasicAer backend. The first solves the problem with the limit of max_shots in this backend (prior it was set arbitrarily to 65536 and now it is unlimited max_shots) and the second makes "date" a default attribute for the BasicAer backends. A major problem was identified with the use of tox to test the new additions because using a MacBook pro with the new M1 chip gives some problems with a library called JAX that is installed when executing tox. The problem was solved by deleting those lines that contain JAX in the "requirements-dev.txt". Our next goal and the most important for this mentorship is to create the version of the backend BasicAer.qasm_simulator using qiskit.quantum_info this will improve the performance of executing circuits and will make the maintenance more straightforward because at the end the code that will be used is the quantum_info.
