Design of a Web and User Interface for Ising Computation Hardware
Ising Machines are a promising category of computation devices for efficiently solving combinatorial optimizations. These devices harness physics to tackle complex problems such as Traveling Salesman and Max Cut far more efficiently than conventional computers. In order to apply these devices to practical problems, several key components are needed. These components include a web interface and software tools to help users format problems for the device and interpret the results. To this end, an HTTP RESTful application programming interface was designed using Python to enable web access to the device, modeled after a similar interface by Hitachi. Problems can be submitted via HTTP POST requests; the solution is returned in the POST response. On the client side, models and visualization tools were constructed in Python to visualize combinatorial problems and their solutions. The Ising Machine is modeled and visualized as a network graph with weighted edges. All of these tools are flexible with the goal of being extendable and scalable through many interactions of the underlying hardware.