QPU Reservations

Reserving time on a QPU requires an existing QCS account. If you don't already have a QCS account, you can request one.

What is a QPU Reservation?

A QPU reservation gives you maximum-priority access to a particular QPU for a period of time, scheduled in advance in increments of 15 minutes. See the instructions below for how to schedule a reservation.

Parallelization

During a reservation, programs which use different sections of the QPU may be safely run in parallel with one another. This means that, during a 15-minute reservation, it's possible to run more than 15 minutes worth of programs!

What sections does a QPU have, and how do I know if my programs will run in parallel?

On our 84-Qubit Ankaa QPUs, each row of 7 qubits is such a section:

0   1   2   3   4   5   6 <-- programs on only these qubits...
7   8   9  10  11  12  13 <-- ...can be parallelized with programs on these.
...

Pricing

Reservations are priced by minute of reservation time, rather than by the number of programs that are run. Programs run within a reservation are, themselves, free of cost.

Make a Reservation

There are two ways to reserve time on a Rigetti QPU:

• Using the QCS dashboard

• Using the QCS CLI

Using the QCS Dashboard

From the QCS dashboard, start by selecting a desired reservation duration, date, and time, then click the search icon.

You'll be presented with a list of available QPUs, including information about each QPU's topology and fidelities. Simply select a desired QPU and follow the confirmation prompts.

Once finished, you'll receive an email confirming the reservation.

Viewing or Cancelling a Reservation

To view upcoming reservations, visit the QCS dashboard and scroll down until you see the Upcoming Reservations section.

From there, click View all your reservations to see past and future reservations, or click the trash can icon next to a reservation to cancel it.

Using the QCS CLI

If you're using the QCS CLI from a local computer instead of your provisioned JupyterLab IDE, ensure you've downloaded and configured the CLI. While you are not able to run programs on a QPU from your local computer, you can otherwise interact with the QCS API from wherever you are.

First, view a list of available QPUs:

qcs api list-quantum-processors

If you'd like to inspect the topology and fidelity information for a QPU, you can use qcs api get-instruction-set-architecture <quantum-processor-id>.

For example, to inspect Aspen-9, run:

qcs api get-instruction-set-architecture Aspen-9

Once you've selected a QPU, interactively select an available reservation with the qcs tools reserve command.

For example, to book a reservation on Aspen-9, run:

qcs tools reserve --quantum-processor-id Aspen-9

There are more options available to this command than shown above. See the QCS CLI reference for more details.

Once finished, you'll receive an email confirming the reservation.

Viewing or Cancelling a Reservation

To list reservations, run:

qcs api list-reservations

The above command will list all reservations, past and future. If you'd like to filter based on properties like QPU or start time, you can supply a --filter option.

For example:

qcs api list-reservations --filter 'quantumProcessorId = "Aspen-9"'
qcs api list-reservations --filter 'startTime >= "2021-05-13T00:00:00Z"'

For a list of available filter fields for list-reservations, see the endpoint's documentation.

For more details on formatting filters, see our API documentation.

For help formatting timestamps, see the CLI's format-date command.

To cancel an upcoming reservation, run the following command (supplying the ID for the reservation in place of <reservation-id>):

qcs api delete-reservation <reservation-id>

A reservation's ID can be found by looking at the id field in the results of running qcs api list-reservations, as described above.