Toshiba’s Simulated Bifurcation Machine Now Available on AWS Marketplace 

KAWASAKI, Japan, July 17, 2019 -- 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 — 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 could not handle.

On the AWS Marketplace, TDSL is offering interested parties a limited time free trial on a POC (Proof of Concept) version of the SBM that addresses Ising problems, MAX-SAT problems, and MAX-CUT problems 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.

Source: Toshiba Digital Solutions Corp.