[Coin-discuss] COIN participation in Google Summer of Code 2008?

[Ted Ralphs]

Sebastian,

Thanks for the pointers and ideas. Without having discussed it with
anyone else, I would say we would undoubtedly be interested in doing
this, but I don't think there is anything we can do to pursue it until
they open the application process yet. If you notice that the
application process has opened, please let us know. Thanks for your support.

Cheers,

Ted

Sebastian Nowozin wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> every year Google finances the "Summer of Code", an effort to support
> contributions by students to open-source projects.  Many open-source
> projects take part in this program successfully in the last few years.
>  I am wondering if COIN would consider participating, as there are no
> bad strings attached and this raises the visibility of the project as
> well as supports student developers.  I asked earlier on this mailing
> list but unfortunately did not receive any response.
> 
> If COIN is interested in taking this opportunity, please somebody from
> the project step up and organize a short "mentoring organization"
> application.   The applications have to be submitted around the
> beginning of March and the projects run from June to August.
> 
> The application description:
> http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=60303&topic=10727&ctx=sibling
> More information are available on the previous year SoC website:
> http://code.google.com/soc/2007/
> 
> 
> As for possible projects, I am just a user of the COIN OR projects,
> but the following additions would be nice and would possibly make nice
> Google SoC projects if taken by smart students.  Excuse me if one or
> two project ideas sound a little naive, its just from what I would
> like to see as user.  I am sure the COIN experts can correct these or
> come up with smarter project ideas for students, including maybe their
> own students.
> 
> ===
> 
> Cbc, Clp, automatic tuning wrapper application.  In applications where
> a large number of parameters can be tuned to optimize performance on
> certain problem classes, automatic optimization has become popular.
> For example, optimizing over compiler optimization options can be
> automated (http://www.coyotegulch.com/products/acovea/), and numeric
> calculations can be automatically tuned to exploit the computing
> architecture (http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/).  Cbc and Clp offer
> a large number of parameters to tune and while there are sensible
> defaults, each problem class might benefit from different choices.
> The goal would be to "learn" a set of best parameters given a set of
> example problems of one class.  This might be especially useful for
> tuning Cbc integer optimization options.
> 
> Clp, implementation of the self-dual interior point method.  For the
> usual Mehrotra-style primal-dual interior point methods for linear
> programming a feasible interior point has to be chosen by a heuristic.
>  This heuristic can lead to bad starting points which in turn lead to
> numerical problems or slow convergence.  For the self-dual interior
> point method an extended version of the linear program is created for
> which a trivial interior point is known.  (Reference: Bertsimas,
> "Introduction to Linear Optimization")
> 
> Clp, network simplex implementation.  Linear network simplex and
> possibly convex network optimization.  As Clp already supports network
> matrices according to the FAQ, this would make a very nice and useful
> addition.  Optionally a preprocessor could detect network problems and
> automatically switch to the network simplex method if possible.
> (Reference: Bertsekas, "Network Optimization")
> 
> IpOpt, interface to a CPL-compatible robust linear system solver,
> inclusion into the distribution.  IpOpt is an excellent solver is a
> robust linear system solver is available, such as the Harwell
> Subroutine Library MA57 or PARDISO solvers, which come under their own
> restrictive licenses.  With liberally licensed solvers such as MUMPS
> the stability of IpOpt suffers greatly.  The goal of this project
> would be to survey alternatives compatible with the CPL license and
> interface a suitable candidate with IpOpt.  It involves developing
> testcases to excercise robustness versus the currently available
> solvers (MA27, PARDISO, MUMPS).
> 
> "CMPL", COIN-OR Mathematical Programming Language.  AMPL and GNU
> Mathprog can be used with the COIN-OR solvers.  For AMPL the AMPL
> library is used to read in .nl files produced by the proprietary AMPL
> binary; for GNU Mathprog, the user has to compile a solver binary
> including the GLPK library which is licensed under the GNU GPL.  This
> is unsatisfactory in the long term for two reasons, first, the GNU GPL
> is incompatible with the CPL and hence there can never be official
> binaries distributed by COIN-OR which include support for GNU
> MathProg.  Second, while COIN OR has a large number of high quality
> solvers, a high level modelling layer is missing.  This project would
> provide a sensible starting point, either interfacing to COIN Osi or
> to COIN OS.  Interfacing to the latter would allow extension to
> nonlinear problems later on.  Reimplementing the technically
> well-documented GNU Mathprog language for COIN would provide a great
> first step.
> 
> OBOE, interfaces to other languages.  The OBOE solver has a minimal
> interface over which all relevant information about the optimization
> problem is transmitted.  Interfacing OBOE to other languages (Python,
> Matlab/Octave, Java) will allow easier adoption.  Possibly, multiple
> languages can be wrapped at once with SWIG.  The project would need to
> contain ported examples into the wrapped language and testcases and
> documentation.
> 
> Modelling classes.  In Operations Research a few standard models occur
> again and again, and a clean C++ library of such models could be
> built.  For example a library of planning problems (for example from
> "Production Planning with Mixed Integer Programming" by Pochet and
> Wolsey) could be implemented and thoroughly tested.
> 
> ===
> 
> 
> Thanks for considering,
> Sebastian
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-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Lehigh University
(610)758-4784
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted