Instances

Access to IBM Quantum® Platform services is controlled by the instances to which you are assigned. Users can belong to more than one instance at any given time.

Users with a public account can create an instance in the Open Plan. For organizations outside of IBM®, the organization's administrator assigns users to instances.

The IBM Quantum Platform dashboard displays the instances to which you have access.

Open Plan instance

Once you have an IBM Cloud account, you can create an instance in the Open Plan and access up to 10 minutes total of quantum time per 28-day rolling window. Open Plan users can track their usage on the Platform dashboard and the Workloads pages.

View your instances

You can see information about your instances programmatically or in the user interface.

List your instances programmatically

You can use the instances() method to list your instances programmatically.

View instances in the IBM Quantum interface

Within the IBM Quantum interface, the IBM Quantum Platform dashboard, Compute resources, and Workloads pages display information such as usage metrics, workloads, and quantum computers based on your account. If you have access to multiple accounts, use the dropdown in the menu bar to switch between accounts.

By default, the Workloads and Quantum computers pages display all data across all instances you can access within an account. You can filter the data table by a specific instance using the filter icon in the upper right.

How usage affects job priority within an instance

When determining which jobs to run, the fair-share scheduler takes into account an instance's usage compared to its allocation. For example, an instance with a large allocation that has already run many jobs, or has run one very long job, might have a lower priority when compared to an instance with a smaller allocation but very low usage.

The jobs you run and the jobs run by other collaborators in the same instance count toward the reported usage for that instance. You can see the usage for an instance on your dashboard.

If an instance has been marked as "limited" by your administrator (you will see a "Remaining" column in the usage area) and the instance exceeds its allocation (defined by your administrator) within the 28-day rolling window, active and pending workloads might be canceled. If an instance is not limited and the instance exceeds its allocation, jobs run with that instance are likely to run at a lower priority and experience longer queue times.

An alert displays on an instance's usage when it has exceeded its allocation.

Specify an instance in your code

You can specify an instance when initializing the service or when choosing a quantum computer. You can copy the service-level code by clicking the three dots by the instance name on the Platform dashboard.

 
# Optional: List all the instances you can access.
service = QiskitRuntimeService(channel='ibm_cloud')
print(service.instances())
 
# Optional: Specify it at service level. This becomes the default unless overwritten.
service = QiskitRuntimeService(channel='ibm_cloud', instance="CRN")
backend1 = service.backend("ibmq_manila")
 
# Optional: Specify it at the backend level, which overwrites the service-level specification when this backend is used.
backend2 = service.backend("ibmq_manila", instance="CRN")
 
sampler1 = SamplerV2(mode=backend1)
sampler2 = SamplerV2(mode=backend2)

Next steps