Combinatorial optimization is the basis of many computational problems that are commonplace in our society, e.g. in logistics, finance or pharmaceutical research. However, for many real-world applications, finding a solution requires high-performance computer clusters that consume large amounts of energy and run for a long time. This project aims to create a radically new platform of analogue hardware accelerators, so-called Ising machines, that efficiently speed up these computationally difficult tasks in a way unlike any current digital computer. These Ising machines are a newly emerging computational concept and have shown great promise. Yet, their implementation is still highly challenging due to limited bandwidth, scalability and stability issues. A breakthrough is needed to make them practical for real-world applications. Photonics presents an ideal way to achieve this breakthrough due to its inherent parallelism and high speed. We aim to create accelerators for a broad set of problems, that are orders of magnitude faster and more energy efficient than digital computer and state-of-the art Ising machines.