Optimization of population annealing Monte Carlo for large-scale spin-glass simulations

Population annealing Monte Carlo is an efficient sequential algorithm for simulating k-local Boolean Hamiltonians. Because of its structure, the algorithm is inherently parallel and therefore well-suited for large-scale simulations of computationally hard problems. Here we present various ways of optimizing population annealing Monte Carlo using 2-local spin-glass Hamiltonians as a case study. We demonstrate how the algorithm can be optimized from an implementation, algorithmic accelerator, as well as scalable parallelization point of view. This makes population annealing Monte Carlo perfectly-suited to study other frustrated problems such as pyrochlore lattices, constraint-satisfaction problems, as well as higher-order Hamiltonians commonly found in, e.g., topological color codes.