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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Quantum vs. Optical Annealing: Benchmarking the OPO Ising Machine and D-Wave

Ryan Hamerly, Takahiro Inagaki, Peter L. McMahon, Davide Venturelli, Alireza Marandi, Tatsuhiro Onodera, Edwin Ng, Eleanor Gilbert Rieffel, M. M. Fejer, Shoko Utsunomiya, Hiroki Takesue, Y. Yamamoto

Published Jan 1, 2018• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We benchmark the OPO-based Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) against the D-Wave quantum annealer for Ising problems up to size N = 200. The CIM exhibits exponential speedup relative to D-Wave for Ising problems with dense connectivity.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_qels.2018.ftu4a.2

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The coherent Ising machine (CIM) enables efficient sampling of low-lying energy states of the Ising Hamiltonian with all-to-all connectivity by encoding the spins in the amplitudes of pulsed modes in an optical parametric oscillator (OPO). The interaction between the pulses is realized by means of measurement-based optoelectronic feedforward, which enhances the gain for lower-energy spin configurations. We present an efficient method of simulating the CIM on a classical computer that outperforms the CIM itself, as well as the noisy mean-field annealer in terms of both the quality of the samples and the computational speed. It is furthermore advantageous with respect to the CIM in that it can handle Ising Hamiltonians with arbitrary real-valued node coupling strengths. These results illuminate the nature of the faster performance exhibited by the CIM and may give rise to a new class of quantum-inspired algorithms of classical annealing that can successfully compete with existing methods.
)] for fixed anneal times, both on the SK model and on 50% edge density MAX-CUT. This leads to a several orders of magnitude time-to-solution difference for instances with over 50 vertices. An optimal-annealing time analysis is also consistent with a substantial projected performance difference. The difference in performance between the sparsely connected D-Wave machine and the fully-connected CIMs provides strong experimental support for efforts to increase the connectivity of quantum annealers.