TOKYO – Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502), the industry leader in solutions for large-scale combinatorial optimization problems, today announced that its Simulated Bifurcation Machine™ is now available for on-premises trial and testing in Japan. Developers, researchers, and businesses in Japan can now experience the world’s fastest, high accuracy optimization computer for complex problem-solving in real-time by requesting a trial from Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation.
The Simulated Bifurcation Machine™, an Ising machine comprising Toshiba’s innovative quantum-inspired algorithms and corresponding computer solutions for solving combinatorial optimization problems*1, is the company’s star technology for bringing higher efficiencies to industry sectors that must make optimal complex decisions in short time spans, such as finance, logistics, and communications.
Toshiba released the Simulated Bifurcation Machine™ as a cloud service on the AWS market place in July 2019. The cloud service offers easy access to the software, and is suitable for handling big-data computation. The addition of the on-premises Simulated Bifurcation Machine™ to the product line meets market demand for real-time systems that deliver optimal responses to ever-changing situations.
Incorporated into a user’s in-house devices, the on-premises Simulated Bifurcation Machine™ can directly feedback optimization results in real time, avoiding the communications latency that results from use of remote data centers—an important concern in responding instantaneously to fast changing real-world situations.
Toshiba provides a high-performance processing circuit image for the simulated bifurcation algorithms as field programmable gate array (FPGA) configuration data that users can write to commercially available FPGAs. They can then easily configure real-time systems by plugging the FPGAs into different types of prototyping machines (Figure 2). Toshiba also provides an application programming interface (API) that allows users to develop specific applications in either C or Python, both widely used programming languages.
Performance tests running the second generation of the simulation bifurcation algorithm on the on-premises Simulated Bifurcation Machine™ have demonstrated results shadowing data reported in a recently published paper*2, indicating that the on-premises Simulated Bifurcation Machine™ reaches optimal solutions at the world’s fastest computing speed. (Figure 3)
Toshiba also offers three applications that showcase the features of the on-premises Simulated Bifurcation Machine™, including its real-time response, interactive response and high speed and accuracy in dealing with large-scale streaming data. These applications also work as reference designs for users who want to develop their own applications (Figure 4).
“Offering market trials of the on-premises deployment is a big step towards commercializing the Simulated Bifurcation Machine™,” said Kosuke Tatsumura, Chief Research Scientist at Toshiba’s Corporate Research & Development Center. “We will first provide the on-premises service in Japan, and aim to expand into overseas markets in due course. We currently invite overseas customers to experience the excellent performance of the Simulated Bifurcation Machine™ via the cloud service.”.
Looking to the future, Toshiba will reinforce the resources necessary to realize general availability of the Simulated Bifurcation Machine™, and join hands with partners and customers to co-create more innovative applications that bring higher efficiencies to many business sectors.
Notes
*1 H. Goto et al., Science Advances 5, eaav2372 (2019). https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/4/eaav2372;
K. Tatsumura et al., IEEE Int’l Symp. on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 1-5 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCAS45731.2020.9181114;
K. Tatsumura et al., Nature Electronics 4, 208-217(2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00546-4
*2 H. Goto et al., Science Advances 7, eabe7953 (2021). https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/6/eabe7953
*3 Demo videos of the three reference designs and hardware setup (narration in Japanese):