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IEEE/LEOS Summer Topical Meetings

Benchmarking the Poor Man's Ising Machine

Gautham Umasankar, Parth S Shah, Nitin Chandrachoodan, Anil Prabhakar

Published Jul 1, 2021• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate the use of a Time-Multiplexed Opto-Electronic Oscillator based Coherent Ising Machine(CIM) to solve Maxcut Problems. Time multiplexing helps reduce system complexity and size, with good scaling against problem size. Benchmarks against state-of-the-art classical solvers show comparable performance, with encouraging results for further improvements.

DOI
10.1109/sum48717.2021.9505840

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Ising machines are purported to be better at solving large-scale combinatorial optimisation problems better than conventional von Neumann computers. However, these Ising machines are widely believed to be heuristics, whose promise is observed empirically rather than obtained theoretically. We bridge this gap by considering an opto-electronic oscillator based coherent Ising machine, and providing the first analytical proof that under reasonable assumptions, the OEO-CIM is not a heuristic approach. We find and prove bounds on its performance in terms of the expected difference between the objective value at the final iteration and the optimal one, and on the number of iterations required by it. In the process, we emphasise on some of its limitations such as the inability to handle asymmetric coupling between spins, and the absence of external magnetic field applied on them (both of which are necessary in many optimisation problems), along with some issues in its convergence. We overcome these limitations by proposing suitable adjustments and prove that the improved architecture is guaranteed to converge to the optimum of the relaxed objective function.
We introduce the recent progress of coherent Ising machine (CIM), which finds solutions to complex combinatorial optimization problems using a network of degenerate optical parametric oscillators (DOPO). We describe our effort to generate time-multiplexed DOPOs using long-distance fiber cavities including telecom-band phase sensitive amplifiers [1-4]. We then present our experiments where we found solutions to complex combinatorial optimization problems using a CIM with measurement-feedback scheme [5]. Finally, a future perspective of the CIM project will briefly described.
Coherent Ising machines (CIMs) are increasingly anticipated as a new computer that can solve combinatorial optimization problems. CIMs use degenerate optical parametric oscillator pulses as artificial spins. We constructed a 100,512-spin coherent Ising machine, the world's largest. Our CIM can find good solutions to maximum cut problems of 100,000-node graphs ~1000 times faster than simulated annealing. Furthermore, it provides both very good scores and a broad distribution when we operate it near the phase transition point.
The coherent Ising machine (CIM) is a network of optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) that solves for the ground state of Ising problems through OPO bifurcation dynamics. Here, we present experimental results comparing the performance of the CIM to quantum annealers (QAs) on two classes of NP-hard optimization problems: ground state calculation of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model and MAX-CUT. While the two machines perform comparably on sparsely-connected problems such as cubic MAX-CUT, on problems with dense connectivity, the QA shows an exponential performance penalty relative to CIMs. We attribute this to the embedding overhead required to map dense problems onto the sparse hardware architecture of the QA, a problem that can be overcome in photonic architectures such as the CIM.