[Coin-discuss] Contribution ?

[Bertrand Le cun]

Hi,

I am Bertrand Le cun, a french researcher (Opale team, of the PRiSM Laboratory 
in University  of Versailles, France) working in the field of software/library 
for writing parallel, multithreaded  Combinatorial Optimization algorithms.

I have produce Bob a C library working for sequential or parallel Branch and 
Bound, and A*.

I am working on Bob++ its evolution in C++/Java (2 versions exist).
At this time, i have worked on the design of the API for different algorithms
(Branch and Bound/Price/Cut, but also Dynamic programming, and A*.
All of them could be parallel or distributed.
I would to integrate other algorithms like metaheuristic (I focus on Tabu).

So when i discover COIN, i stoped, i do not want to reinvent the wheel.
But maybe could be more interesting that i contribute to the COIN developpement ?

I have several Questions about the choice of your design.

1- Why use PVM or Serial communication library, MPI, or Multithreaded libraries like
PM2 (http://www.pm2.org/), or other could be a better choice. 
An application could be executed on Cluster of SMP, (like IBM SP3, i think).

2- it seems that you focus on MIP algorithms. 
Could it be hard to implement a Branch and Bound base algo, to let to the 
user to use it without a solver ? 
I have seen on your FAQ that you plan to use your OSI interface  and not only OSL.

3- Do you plan to add lp_solve or soplex solvers in OSI that are free solvers ?

4- The final question : 
   Do you plan to add a language like AMPL on top of your library ?

I really interesting to contribute to the development of COIN.
I precise that i really prefer to develop on Unix (Linux or Solaris) but not really
on windows.
So if you are interesting in "me", let me know where, and how i can contribute...

Information Field

I am the responsable of the EURO Working Group PAREO (EURO is the European association
for OR). The PAREO working group aims to bring together researchers from both academia 
and industry who are interested in the development of parallel algorithms for problems 
in the area of operations research. The group is not reserved to european (See my home page).

The annual PAREO event is organized during the Annual EURO conference
(http://www.euro2001.org/). Maybe are you interesting in to give a talk in 
the PAREO Session ?

Best regards,


Bertrand-
PS: sorry for my english ;-(
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                           Bertrand LE CUN                            |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Universite de Versailles St Quentin, Laboratoire PRiSM, OPALE Team   |
| 45, avenue des Etats-Unis 78000 Versailles                           |
| email: Bertrand.Lecun at prism.uvsq.fr       Phone: (+33 1) 39 25 40 50 |
| Web  : http://www.prism.uvsq.fr/~blec
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+