[Coin-discuss] Clustering COIN?

[anthony at resolution.com]

Ted / All,

I hope this finds you well.  Great information about the parallel solver.

I've downloaded COPS and am looking into installing and setting it up.  It
looks like it relies on MPI to handle the messaging?  We'd be happy to
share our experience w/ building a cluster out with COPS if it works for
us!

A few questions before we go too far in the right / wrong direction:

1.  We're using CBC right now to solve an MPS file.  Does COPS read MPS
files?

2.  Our model runs around 3 hours at the moment, with CBC.  Do you have
any idea what type of performance we could see with COPS?

3.  I've got an MPS file .... any chance I could get you to run it on your
cluster and see what type of performance we're looking at .... before we
spend several days rolling out a solution which might not work?

Again, if this is a valid solution for us, we'll probably use EC2 as our
architecture, and I'd be happy to share the results.

Thanks a bunch!

--
Anthony


> With the COPS project (soon to be renamed CHiPPS), we have been
> developing solvers designed to run effectively on large clusters.
>
> https://projects.coin-or.org/Cops
>
> Our MIP solver (called BLIS), while not as full-featured as CBC, is a
fairly robust and effective solver which should be a reasonable
> alternative to CBC if you want to take advantage of a large cluster. We
are getting ready to release a new version of BLIS (0.9.0) in the next
few days. The documentation is a little sparse right now, but we're
working on it. If you're interested in using it, please let us know and
we'll do our best to help.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ted
>
> Ian Grey wrote:
>> Hi, I was wondering if anyone has any experience running a COIN solver
on a server cluster.  Is this even possible?  Is it any faster?  We are
trying to run cbc as a solver for a web application, and we have some
problems that are taking multiple hours to finish.  We were wondering
if it would be possible to set it up on a server cluster such as
Amazon's EC2 service.
>> This may not even be possible, but if it is, and anyone has any
information, it would be very much appreciated.
>> Ian
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>
>
> --
> Dr. Ted Ralphs
> Associate Professor
> Industrial and Systems Engineering
> Lehigh University
> (610)758-4784
> ted at lehigh dot edu
> www.lehigh.edu/~tkr2
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