Spinto: High-performance energy minimization in spin glasses

Abstract

Abstract-With the prospect of atomic-scale computing, we study cumulative energy profiles of spin-spin interactions in nonferromagnetic lattices (Ising spin-glasses)-an established topic in solid-state physics that is now becoming relevant to atomicscale EDA. Recent proposals suggest non-traditional computing devices based on nature's ability to find min-energy states. Spinto utilizes EDA-inspired high-performance algorithms to (i) simulate natural energy minimization in spin systems and (ii) study its potential for solving hard computational problems. Unlike previous work, our algorithms are not limited to planar Ising topologies. In one CPU-day, our branch-and-bound algorithm finds min-energy (ground) states on 100 spins, while our local search approximates ground states on 1, 000, 000 spins. We use this computational tool to study the significance of hyper-couplings in the context of recently implemented adiabatic quantum computers.