Communications of the ACM
Annealing Processor Excels at Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems
Researchers in Japan have developed a new annealer architecture to handle combinatorial optimization problems.
Credit: Tokyo Institute of Technology
Researchers at Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology, Hokkaido University, the University of Tokyo, and Hitachi have developed a new annealer architecture to handle combinatorial optimization problems.
The new processor, called STATICA (Stochastic Cellular Automata Annealer Architecture), is designed to address challenges such as portfolio, logistic, and traffic flow optimization when they are expressed in the form of Ising models.
Other annealers calculate spin switchings one by one, making it a serial process. With STATICA, that updating is performed in parallel using stochastic cellular automata (SCA)—a means of simulating complex systems using the interactions of a large number of neighboring "cells" with simple updating rules and some randomness.
SCA introduces copies of the original spins into the process, and all original spin-spin interactions are redirected to their individual replica spins.
From IEEE Spectrum
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