  Energy minimization of Ising spin-glasses has played a central role in
statistical and solid-state physics, facilitating studies of phase transitions
and magnetism. Recent proposals suggest using Ising spin-glasses for
non-traditional computing as a way to harness the nature's ability to find
min-energy configurations, and to take advantage of quantum tunneling to boost
combinatorial optimization. Laboratory demonstrations have been unconvincing so
far and lack a non-quantum baseline for definitive comparisons. In this work we
(i) design and evaluate new computational techniques to simulate natural energy
minimization in spin glasses and (ii) explore their application to study design
alternatives in quantum adiabatic computers. Unlike previous work, our
algorithms are not limited to planar Ising topologies. In one CPU-day, our
branch-and-bound algorithm finds ground states on 100 spins, while our local
search approximates ground states on 1, 000, 000 spins. We use this
computational tool as a simulator to study the significance of hyper-couplings
in the context of recently implemented adiabatic quantum computers.
