A Cloud-ready Scalable Annealing Processor for Solving Large-scale Combinatorial Optimization Problems

Abstract

This paper presents a CMOS annealing processor (CMOS-AP) that accelerates ground state searches of the Ising model. The main feature of this processor is its inter-chip connection interface for making a larger chip. A credit card sized compute node integrating two CMOS-APs was also developed as an interface with existing computer systems. The compute node can handle up to 61,952 spins at a time. A performance evaluation using the node improved the CPU speed by 55 times in solving a minimum vertex cover problem, one of the NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Finally, we describe a cloud interface for the compute node to make the CMOS-APs more useful and to promote application development for it.