Stress-testing memcomputing on hard combinatorial optimization problems

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that digital memcomputing machines, simulated efficiently on classical computers, can solve large-scale hard combinatorial optimization problems with linear resource scaling, outperforming traditional algorithms.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale stress test of memcomputing on combinatorial problems, showing linear scaling up to nearly a billion literals, highlighting its practical advantages.

Findings

Memcomputing simulations scale linearly with problem size.

Digital memcomputing outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on hard problems.

Largest tested problem involved approximately 1 billion literals.

Abstract

Memcomputing is a novel paradigm of computation that utilizes dynamical elements with memory to both store and process information on the same physical location. Its building blocks can be fabricated in hardware with standard electronic circuits, thus offering a path to its practical realization. In addition, since memcomputing is based on non-quantum elements, the equations of motion describing these machines can be simulated efficiently on standard computers. In fact, it was recently realized that memcomputing, and in particular its digital (hence scalable) version, when simulated on a classical machine provides a significant speed-up over state-of-the-art algorithms on a variety of non-convex problems. Here, we stress-test the capabilities of this approach on finding approximate solutions to hard combinatorial optimization problems. These fall into a class which is known to require exponentially growing resources in the worst cases, even to generate approximations. We recently showed that in a region where state of the art algorithms demonstrate this exponential growth, simulations of digital memcomputing machines performed using the Falcon$^\copyright$ simulator of MemComputing, Inc. only require time and memory resources that scale linearly. These results are extended in a stress-test up to $64\times10^6$ variables (corresponding to about 1 billion literals), namely the largest case that we could fit on a single node with 128 GB of DRAM. Since memcomputing can be applied to a wide variety of optimization problems, this stress test shows the considerable advantage of non-combinatorial, physics-inspired approaches over standard combinatorial ones.