Most people work weekdays during daylight hours, but I often find myself running experiments on weekends, too. And, as unappealing as that may seem to most people, there is a distinct productivity advantage to being able to use real quantum computers without having to wait in lengthy queues.

In fact, the largest system currently available to me often has no queue at all on weekends. The time to run code on a simulator or on real hardware is the same. During the week, in contrast, I’ve waited hours and even overnight for an experiment to run.

Interestingly, the smaller machines are often still in use. Perhaps that is because most experiments use only five qubits or less? Also, new users start with smaller experiments that require less qubits.

Most of my work these days requires more than five qubits, however, so I have to wait for just one particular quantum computer. I’m referring to ibmq_16_melbourne, by the way, available through IBM Q Experience.

As much as I don’t want to start waiting in queues on weekends, I am sharing this observation in case it is helpful to others. I know how frustrating it can be to try to troubleshoot your experiment and have to wait hours to check each result. In contrast, I ran a bunch of experiments yesterday (Saturday) and had each result in less than a minute. It was wonderful.