Benchmark of quantum-inspired heuristic solvers for quadratic unconstrained binary optimization

Masayuki Ohzeki,Hiroki Oshiyama

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-06070-5

Abstract

Recently, inspired by quantum annealing, many solvers specialized for unconstrained binary quadratic programming problems have been developed. For further improvement and application of these solvers, it is important to clarify the differences in their performance for various types of problems. In this study, the performance of four quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem solvers, namely D-Wave Hybrid Solver Service (HSS), Toshiba Simulated Bifurcation Machine (SBM), Fujitsu Digital Annealer (DA), and simulated annealing on a personal computer, was benchmarked. The problems used for benchmarking were instances of real problems in MQLib, instances of the SAT-UNSAT phase transition point of random not-all-equal 3-SAT (NAE 3-SAT), and the Ising spin glass Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model. Concerning MQLib instances, the HSS performance ranked first; for NAE 3-SAT, DA performance ranked first; and regarding the SK model, SBM performance ranked first. These results may help understand the strengths and weaknesses of these solvers.

Highlights

Inspired by quantum annealing, many solvers specialized for unconstrained binary quadratic programming problems have been developed
For MQLib instances, which are a set of various problem instances including real-world problems, Hybrid Solver Service (HSS) showed the best performance on average, and Simulated Bifurcation Machine (SBM) showed stable performance that was not so different from HSS
It is rather natural result that the performance of Digital Annealer (DA) varied depending on the instances because the performance of heuristic algorithms strongly depends on the problem instances in general, and it is somewhat surprising that HSS and SBM showed stable performance

Summary

Introduction

Inspired by quantum annealing, many solvers specialized for unconstrained binary quadratic programming problems have been developed. We benchmarked the performance of three commercialized QUBO solvers including one using a real QA device: D-Wave Hybrid Solver Service (HSS), Toshiba Simulated Bifurcation Machine (SBM), and Fujitsu Digital Annealer (DA). For HSS and SBM, the execution time was set to 5 min.

Results

Conclusion