Improve performance and usability of BasicAer

[kevinsung]

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:

• Leverage quantum_info in StatevectorSimulatorPy Qiskit/qiskit#7670
• BasicAer fails when shots requested exceeds a threshold Qiskit/qiskit#7634
• Add date attribute to BasicAer job result Qiskit/qiskit#7781
• qiskit.providers.basicaer needs better module level docs Qiskit/qiskit#3403

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

[kevinsung]

This project now has a mentee: @alejomonbar

[alejomonbar]

#37 Improve performance and usability of BasicAer.pdf

[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.

[alejomonbar]

#37 Improve performance and usability of BasicAer v2.pdf