Quantum error correction (QEC) is the holy grail of quantum computing because it allows to counter the deleterious influence of decoherence. Yet, it comes at a price: hardware noise must be under a given threshold for QEC to deliver improved performance. The most widespread way of estimating the QEC threshold involves making several assumptions as to the hardware noise and the decoding process. These assumptions allow for an efficient numerical simulation of the QEC process, but yield only approximate thresholds. The goal of this internship is to compute more realistic QEC thresholds by removing the simplifying assumptions. This leads to much more complex numerical simulations, yet also much more useful predictions that could be used to tailor QEC codes to a given hardware. The internship will greatly benefit from the HPC Qaptiva emulators. Reference: http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.04736