Optimized simulated annealing for Ising spin glasses

S. V. Isakov, I. N. Zintchenko, T. F. Rønnow, M. Troyer

Published 2014-01-06, updated 2015-09-24Version 4

We present several efficient implementations of the simulated annealing algorithm for Ising spin glasses on sparse graphs. In particular, we provide a generic code for any choice of couplings, an optimized code for bipartite graphs, and highly optimized implementations using multi-spin coding for graphs with small maximum degree and discrete couplings with a finite range. The latter codes achieve up to 50 spin flips per nanosecond on modern Intel CPUs. We also compare the performance of the codes to that of the special purpose D-Wave devices built for solving such Ising spin glass problems.