Fast Solving Complete 2000-Node Optimization Using Stochastic-Computing Simulated Annealing

In this paper, we evaluate stochastic-computing simulated annealing (SC-SA) for solving large-scale combinato-rial optimization problems. SC-SA is designed using stochastic computing, where the computation is realized using random bitstream, resulting in fast converging to the global minimum energy of the problems. The proposed SC-SA is compared with a typical SA and existing simulated-annealing (SA) processors on the maximum cut (MAX-CUT) problems, such as Gset that is a benchmark for SA. The simulation results show that SC-SA realizes hundreds of times faster than a typical SA. In addition, SC-SA achieves better MAX-CUT scores than other existing methods on K2000 that is a complete 2000-node optimization problem.