What does the Qiskit transpile function do on an Azure Quantum IonQ provider?

Question

I can run a circuit on IonQ through Azure Quantum, but I was wondering if I need to run the transpile function.

Answer 1

From Qiskit API Documentation, Submitting circuits to IonQ backends:

The IonQ provider provides access to the full IonQ Cloud backend, which includes its own transpilation and compilation pipeline. As such, IonQ provider backends have a broad set of "basis gates" that they will accept — effectively anything the IonQ API will accept:

['ccx', 'ch', 'cnot', 'cp', 'crx', 'cry', 'crz', 'csx', 'cx', 'cy', 'cz', 'h', 'i', 'id', 'mcp', 'mcphase', 'mct', 'mcx', 'mcx_gray', 'measure', 'p', 'rx', 'rxx', 'ry', 'ryy', 'rz', 'rzz', 's', 'sdg', 'swap', 'sx', 'sxdg', 't', 'tdg', 'toffoli', 'x', 'y', 'z']

If you have circuits that you’d like to run on IonQ backends that use other gates than this (u or iswap for example), you will either need to manually rewrite the circuit to only use the above list, or use the Qiskit transpiler, per the example below. Please note that not all circuits can be automatically transpiled.