Understanding the usage of quantum simulators
A quantum computer simulator is a software program that simulates the quantum mechanical behavior of a real quantum computer. Simulators are useful for testing your quantum circuits in a local environment before you run them on the IBM Quantum® backends in the cloud. You can also use cloud-based simulators to test larger quantum circuits that might not yet be possible to run on actual quantum computers or just take too long to run on your local simulator.
In this recipe, we will take a quick tour to compare the available Qiskit® simulators—both local on Qiskit Aer and in the cloud on IBM Quantum®.
Getting ready
Make sure you have everything working from Chapter 1, Preparing Your Environment.
The sample code for this recipe can be found here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Quantum-Computing-in-Practice-with-Qiskit-and-IBM-Quantum-Experience/blob/master/Chapter07/ch7_r1_aer.py.
