Providers

A Provider is discovery-only: a named owner of a backend family, never an executor.

• LocalProvider exposes the built-in local simulators (local_simulator, statevector, density_matrix, plus the deterministic mock stub).

• HardwareProvider discovers and owns a vendor integration (credentials, REST API). Its HardwareBackend presents the vendor job through the Backend contract, so hardware jobs look identical to local ones. Vendor-specific concepts live in provider-specific classes (e.g. IBMQuantumCredentials, IonQCredentials) — never in the generic contracts.

from microquantum import LocalProvider, available_backends

provider = LocalProvider()
backends = provider.backends()               # local simulator names
print(backends)
print(available_backends())

Backend registry

BackendRegistry is the discovery point: register / get / has / names, a settable default, and JSON serialization. Plans may name a backend by string; the runtime resolves names through its attached registry (falling back to the module-level default_registry).

from microquantum import BackendRegistry, MockBackend

registry = BackendRegistry()
registry.register(MockBackend(name="mock"))
print(registry.has("mock"))        # True
print(registry.names())            # ['local_simulator', 'mock']

Hardware (optional boundary)

The microquantum.providers hardware layer is the optional vendor-facing side of the BackendAdapter boundary (Custom Backends); the SDK never imports vendor SDKs.