News

Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation’s Simulated Bifurcation Machine,
Software Enabling Massive Combinatorial Optimization at High Speed,
Now Available on AWS Marketplace:

― Company starting a demonstration experiment towards solving problems in diverse fields ―

July 17, 2019
Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation

KAWASAKI--Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (TDSL) has made its Simulated Bifurcation Machine (SBM)—software that implements the simulated bifurcation algorithm introduced by Toshiba Corporation in April 2019*1 —available to potential customers worldwide by releasing it on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. TDSL will be embarking on a series of demonstration experiments that apply the SBM to finding solutions to issues in diverse fields, and by promoting collaborations with companies, universities, and research institutes around the world interested in conducting joint research and development in the area of massive combinatorial optimization.

Solutions to combinatorial optimization problems find the optimum combination of alternatives among an exponential number of candidates. Such problems occur in many different areas, including logistics optimization, financial portfolio optimization, and the molecular design of drugs. These are all problems that require an enormous number of calculations to reach a solution, and the traditional approach faces difficulties in respect of the increasing scale of problems and the need to shorten the time taken to arrive at a solution.

The SBM that TDSL has just released as a service provider obtains good approximate solutions to large-scale complex problems at high speed with high accuracy. Without any need for special hardware, the SBM can solve problems that have previous Ising machines*2 could not handle.

On the AWS Marketplace, TDSL is offering interested parties a limited time free trial*3 on a POC (Proof of Concept) version of the SBM*4 that addresses Ising problems*5 , MAX-SAT problems,*6 and MAX-CUT problems*7 with up to 10,000 variables. During this limited period, TDSL invites partners to collaborate in its problem-solving efforts. At the same time, TDSL will continue to conduct more PoC experiments, towards finding solutions to combinatorial optimization problems in various fields, and to develop SBM-based applications for a wide range of disciplines, including finance, drug discovery, genetic engineering, logistics, and AI.

Alongside its R&D activities, TDSL is seeking to build a new business with the SBM by making it available for application in solving intractable problems. TDSL looks to start offering an SBM-based cloud service on a public cloud by the end of 2019.

 

TDSL’s release of the SBM has met a positive response from development partners:

Satoshi Miki, Representative Director / CEO, Fixstars Corporation
We are pleased that we can work together with Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation as a partner in developing a PoC of SBM. We will contribute to developing applications for solving large-scale "combinatorial optimization problems” at high speed in areas such as gene analytics, finance and logistics by using our long-term experience and knowledge of quantum computing technology.

Hisahiro Mukai, CEO, Nextremer Co., Ltd.
Nextremer Co., Ltd. warmly welcomes Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation's SBM technology making its services public on the AWS Marketplace. We expect SBM will be providing steady solutions to a wide variety of problems concerning combinatorial optimization. Nextremer Co. Ltd. continues to expand its strong partnership with Toshiba Digital Solutions. We also plan on continuing to provide solutions to society's problems with our underlying goal of "the collaboration of humans and technology".

  • *1  -20 Apr, 2019 Research News (TOSHIBA CORPORATION)
      Toshiba's Breakthrough Algorithm Realizes World's Fastest, Largest-scale Combinatorial Optimization
      https://www.global.toshiba/ww/technology/corporate/rdc/rd/topics/19/1904-01.html
    -Science Advances 19 Apr. 2019, Vol. 5, no. 4, eaav2372 (American Association for the Advancement of Science)
      https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/4/eaav2372
  • *2  Refers to technologies (hardware and software) used to solve combinatorial optimization problems that can be mapped to Ising problems. An Ising problem is a problem that finds the ground states of the Ising model, a model in statistical dynamics, which explains the phenomena of magnetization in magnets, where each atom has a spin.
  • *3  Until the end of October 2019
  • *4  Users are asked to enter into agreements with AWS.
  • *5  See note 2 above.
  • *6  Maximum Satisfiability Problem, a problem, where, given a Boolean formula F in a conjunctive normal form with several clauses, one needs to determine the maximum number of clauses by setting a variable to either true or false.
  • *7  Maximum Cut Problem, a graph partitioning problem whose objective is to partition the nodes (vertices) of a graph into two subsets, such that the sum of the weights of the edges (lines) connecting the two subsets is maximum.

 

SBM product page on AWS Marketplace:
  https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B07T8STKZR/

Visit us to learn more about the SBM: (It will be opened in late July.)
  In Japanese https://www.global.toshiba/jp/products-solutions/ai-iot/sbm.html
  In English https://www.global.toshiba/ww/products-solutions/ai-iot/sbm.html

  • *  Amazon Web Services, the “Powered by AWS” logo, AWS Marketplace and the AWS Marketplace logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.
  • *  The names of companies, products, and services mentioned in this press release may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective owners.