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verified publisher icon Qiskit

Make Aer an optional dependency

Open garrison opened this issue 2 years ago • 2 comments

Qiskit Aer is used in ckt in one place: cutqc verification. We should change Aer to be an optional dependency instead. If Aer is not installed, the simulator introduced in #145 should suffice.

Of course, running the tests or notebooks will still require that Aer is installed.

garrison avatar May 08 '23 20:05 garrison

Once cutqc is deprecated (#494), we'll be one step closer to dropping the Aer dependency. We might just want to wait until we remove cutqc to drop it.

garrison avatar Mar 06 '24 21:03 garrison

The qiskit-ibm-runtime primitives in local mode, which we plan to use in our tutorials starting in #511, actually seem to take a different code path for simulation based on whether Aer is installed.

For this reason, we should either (i) keep Aer as a dependency, even if all explicit references to Aer in the CKT library are removed; or, (ii) perform testing both with Aer installed and with Aer absent. The first option is simpler for us, as it means we don't have to ensure compatibility with ~~BasicProvider~~ BasicSimulator.

garrison avatar Apr 02 '24 13:04 garrison