Is there anything you can do on a rented QC that you can't do cheaper on a simulated QC on a "classical" CPU/GPU today?
No. They're a decent playground for prototyping hybrid algorithms but even that is limited. No one has yet published a hybrid algorithm on a rentable QC provider that has better benchmark performance than a modern CPU/GPU implementation.
hello,
yes ... especially if you want to execute quantum-circuits which use a lot of qubits.
why!? one approach of the simulation of quantum-computers rely on the so called "state vector" of the machine, and its memory-usage grows exponentially.
for example qiskit AER
* https://qiskit.github.io/qiskit-aer/stubs/qiskit_aer.Stateve...
just as an example:
for 32 qubits, the simulator needs 64 GB RAM
=?> double the RAM for each additional qubit
so: for 36 qubits, the simulator needs 1 TB RAM
:)
so it gets pretty "costly" to do simulations rather quickly ...
just my 0.02€