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arXiv:2311.16559

Graph Partitioning with Fujitsu Digital Annealer

Yu-Ting Kao, Hsiu-Chuan Hsu

Published Nov 28, 2023• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Graph partitioning, or community detection, is the cornerstone of many fields, such as logistics, transportation and smart power grids. Efficient computation and efficacious evaluation of communities are both essential, especially in commercial and industrial settings. However, the solution space of graph partitioning increases drastically with the number of vertices and subgroups. With an eye to solving large scale graph partitioning and other optimization problems within a short period of time, the Digital Annealer (DA), a specialized CMOS hardware also featuring improved algorithms, has been devised by Fujitsu Ltd. This study gauges Fujitsu DA's performance and running times. The modularity was implemented as both the objective function and metric for the solutions. The graph partitioning problems were formatted into Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) structures so that they could be adequately imported into the DA. The DA yielded the highest modularity among other studies when partitioning Karate Club, Les Miserables, American Football, and Dolphin. Moreover, the DA was able to partition the Case 1354pegase power grid network into 45 subgroups, calling for 60,930 binary variables, whilst delivering optimal modularity results within a solving time of roughly 80 seconds. Our results suggest that the Fujitsu DA can be applied for rapid and efficient optimization for graph partitioning.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2311.16559

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Graph partitioning, or community detection, is the cornerstone of many fields, such as logistics, transportation and smart power grids. Efficient computation and efficacious evaluation of communities are both essential, especially in commercial and industrial settings. However, the solution space of graph partitioning increases drastically with the number of vertices and subgroups. With an eye to solving large scale graph partitioning and other optimization problems within a short period of time, the Digital Annealer (DA), a specialized CMOS hardware also featuring improved algorithms, has been devised by Fujitsu Ltd. This study gauges Fujitsu DA's performance and running times. The modularity was implemented as both the objective function and metric for the solutions. The graph partitioning problems were formatted into Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) structures so that they could be adequately imported into the DA. The DA yielded the highest modularity among other studies when partitioning Karate Club, Les Miserables, American Football, and Dolphin. Moreover, the DA was able to partition the Case 1354pegase power grid network into 45 subgroups, calling for 60,930 binary variables, whilst delivering optimal modularity results within a solving time of roughly 80 seconds. Our results suggest that the Fujitsu DA can be applied for rapid and efficient optimization for graph partitioning.
Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in various disciplines and applications. Many heuristic algorithms have been devoted to solve these types of problems. In order to increase the efficiency for finding the optimal solutions, an application-specific hardware, called digital annealer (DA) has been developed for solving combinatorial optimization problems using quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) formulations. In this study, we formulated the number partitioning problem and the graph partitioning problem into QUBO forms and solved such problems with the DA developed by Fujitsu Ltd. The QUBO formulation of the number partitioning problem is fully connected. The DA found the overall runtime for the optimal solution to be less than 30 seconds for 6500 binary variables. For the graph partitioning problem, we adopted modularity as the metric for determining the quality of the partitions. For Zachary's Karate Club graph, the modularity obtained was 0.445, a 6% increase against D-wave Quantum Annealer and Simulated Annealing. Moreover, to explore the DA's potential applications to real-world problems, we used the search for communities or virtual microgrids in a power distribution network as an example. The problem was formulated into graph partitioning. It is shown that the DA effectively identified community structures in the IEEE 33-bus and IEEE 118-bus network.
Community detection, also known as graph partitioning, is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with applications in diverse fields such as complex network theory, transportation, and smart power grids. The problem's solution space grows drastically with the number of vertices and subgroups, making efficient algorithms crucial. In recent years, quantum computing has emerged as a promising approach to tackling NP-hard problems. This study explores the use of a quantum-inspired algorithm, Simulated Bifurcation (SB), for community detection. Modularity is employed as both the objective function and a metric to evaluate the solutions. The community detection problem is formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem, enabling seamless integration with the SB algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that SB effectively identifies community structures in benchmark networks such as Zachary's Karate Club and the IEEE 33-bus system. Remarkably, SB achieved the highest modularity, matching the performance of Fujitsu's Digital Annealer, while surpassing results obtained from two quantum machines, D-Wave and IBM. These findings highlight the potential of Simulated Bifurcation as a powerful tool for solving community detection problems.
Abstract Quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) formulations of combinatorial optimization problems allow for solving them using various quantum heuristics. While large-scale quantum computations are currently still out of reach, we can already numerically test such QUBO formulations on a perhaps surprisingly large scale. In this work, we benchmark Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer (DA) on the Max-Cut problem, which captures the main complexity of the QUBO problem. We make a comprehensive benchmark against leading other heuristic algorithms on graphs with up to 53,000 variables by focusing on the wall-clock time. Moreover, we compare the DA performance against published performance results of the D-Wave hybrid quantum–classical annealer and the recently proposed QIS3 heuristic. Based on performance statistics for over 2000 graphs from the MQLib, we find that the DA yields competitive results. We hope that this benchmark demonstrates the extent to which large QUBO instances can be heuristically solved today, yielding consistent results across different solvers.
The Fujitsu Digital Annealer is designed to solve fully connected quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. It is implemented on application-specific CMOS hardware and currently solves problems of up to 1024 variables. The Digital Annealer's algorithm is currently based on simulated annealing; however, it differs from it in its utilization of an efficient parallel-trial scheme and a dynamic escape mechanism. In addition, the Digital Annealer exploits the massive parallelization that custom application-specific CMOS hardware allows. We compare the performance of the Digital Annealer to simulated annealing and parallel tempering with isoenergetic cluster moves on two-dimensional and fully connected spin-glass problems with bimodal and Gaussian couplings. These represent the respective limits of sparse versus dense problems, as well as high-degeneracy versus low-degeneracy problems. Our results show that the Digital Annealer currently exhibits a time-to-solution speedup of roughly two orders of magnitude for fully connected spin-glass problems with bimodal or Gaussian couplings, over the single-core implementations of simulated annealing and parallel tempering Monte Carlo used in this study. The Digital Annealer does not appear to exhibit a speedup for sparse two-dimensional spin-glass problems, which we explain on theoretical grounds. We also benchmarked an early implementation of the Parallel Tempering Digital Annealer. Our results suggest an improved scaling over the other algorithms for fully connected problems of average difficulty with bimodal disorder. The next generation of the Digital Annealer is expected to be able to solve fully connected problems up to 8192 variables in size. This would enable the study of fundamental physics problems and industrial applications that were previously inaccessible using standard computing hardware or special-purpose quantum annealing machines.
QUBO formulations of combinatorial optimization problems allow for solving them using various quantum heuristics. While large-scale quantum computations are currently still out of reach, we can already numerically test such QUBO formulations on a perhaps surprisingly large scale. In this work, we benchmark Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer (DA) on the Max-Cut problem, which captures the main complexity of the QUBO problem. We make a comprehensive benchmark against leading other heuristic algorithms on graphs with up to 53,000 variables by focusing on the wall-clock time. Moreover, we compare the DA performance against published performance results of the D-Wave hybrid quantum-classical annealer and the recently proposed QIS3 heuristic. Based on performance statistics for over 2,000 graphs from the MQLib, we find that the DA yields competitive results. We hope that this benchmark demonstrates the extent to which large QUBO instances can be heuristically solved today, yielding consistent results across different solvers.
Graph partitioning is a fundamental problem in various fields, including computer graphics, high-performance computing, and network design. Traditional graph partitioning algorithms often suffer from high computational complexity, particularly when dealing with large and complex graphs. This research investigates the potential of quantum-inspired optimization techniques, specifically leveraging concepts from quantum annealing, to accelerate the graph partitioning process. We formulate the graph partitioning problem as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem, allowing us to simulate the behavior of a quantum annealer on classical hardware. The core of our approach involves mapping the graph's connectivity structure onto a QUBO, representing nodes as binary variables and edges as constraints. By exploiting the inherent parallelism of quantum annealing, we aim to find optimal or near-optimal partitions significantly faster than conventional methods. The results demonstrate the feasibility and potential advantages of this quantum-inspired strategy for graph partitioning, offering a promising direction for tackling computationally intensive graph problems.