Minor-embedding heuristics for large-scale annealing processors with sparse hardware graphs of up to 102,400 nodes

Minor embedding heuristics have become an indispensable tool for compiling problems in quadratically unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) into the hardware graphs of quantum and CMOS annealing processors. While recent embedding heuristics have been developed for annealers of moderate size (about 2000 nodes) the size of the latest CMOS annealing processor (with 102,400 nodes) poses entirely new demands on the embedding heuristic. This raises the question, if recent embedding heuristics can maintain meaningful embedding performance on hardware graphs of increasing size. Here, we develop an improved version of the probabilistic-swap-shift-annealing (PSSA) embedding heuristic [which has recently been demonstrated to outperform the standard embedding heuristic by D-Wave Systems (Cai et al., 2014)] and evaluate its embedding performance on hardware graphs of increasing size. For random-cubic and Barabasi-Albert graphs we find the embedding performance of improved PSSA to consistently exceed the threshold of the best known complete graph embedding by a factor of 3.2 and 2.8, respectively, up to hardware graphs with 102,400 nodes. On the other hand, for random graphs with constant edge density not even improved PSSA can overcome the deterministic threshold guaranteed by the existence of the best known complete graph embedding. Finally, we prove a new upper bound on the maximal embeddable size of complete graphs into hardware graphs of CMOS annealers and show that the embedding performance of its currently best known complete graph embedding has optimal order for hardware graphs with fixed coordination number.