Combinatorial optimization problems prevail in engineering and industry. Some are NP-hard and thus become difficult to solve on edge devices due to limited power and computing resources. Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem is a valuable emerging model that can formulate numerous combinatorial problems, such as Max-Cut, traveling salesman problems, and graphic coloring. QUBO model also reconciles with two emerging computation models, quantum computing and neuromorphic computing, which can potentially boost the speed and energy efficiency in solving combinatorial problems. In this work, we design a neuromorphic QUBO solver composed of a swarm of spiking neural networks (SNN) that conduct a population-based meta-heuristic search for solutions. The proposed model can achieve about x20 40 speedup on large QUBO problems in terms of time steps compared to a traditional neural network solver. As a codesign, we evaluate the neuromorphic swarm solver on a 40nm 25mW Resistive RAM (RRAM) Compute-in-Memory (CIM) SoC with a 2.25MB RRAM-based accelerator and an embedded Cortex M3 core. The collaborative SNN swarm can fully exploit the specialty of CIM accelerator in matrix and vector multiplications. Compared to previous works, such an algorithm-hardware synergized solver exhibits advantageous speed and energy efficiency for edge devices.
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Solving Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization with Collaborative Spiking Neural Networks
Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem becomes an attractive and valuable optimization problem formulation in that it can easily transform into a variety of other combinatorial optimization problems such as Graph/number Partition, Max-Cut, SAT, Vertex Coloring, TSP, etc. Some of these problems are NP-hard and widely applied in industry and scientific research. Meanwhile, QUBO has been discovered to be compatible with two emerging computing paradigms, neuromorphic computing, and quantum computing, with tremendous potential to speed up future optimization solvers. In this paper, we propose a novel neuromorphic computing paradigm that employs multiple collaborative spiking neural networks to solve QUBO problems. Each SNN conducts a local stochastic gradient descent search and shares the global best solutions periodically to perform a meta-heuristic search for optima. We simulate our model and compare it to a single SNN solver and a mult-SNN solver without collaboration. Through tests on benchmark problems, the proposed method is demonstrated to be more efficient and effective in searching for QUBO optima. Specifically, it exhibits x10 and x15-20 speedup respectively on the multi-SNN solver without collaboration and the single-SNN solver.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2153440
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10403834
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing (ICRC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 84 to 88
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRC57508.2022.00021
