[Coin-ipopt] Re: IPOPT Trial Version

[Andreas Waechter]

Hi Walid,

Thanks for your message.  I'm forwarding my reply to the IPOPT mailing
list, since this might be a question of general interest.  (However, I had
trouble posting things the last three weeks, so it might take a
while to get there...)

>   I am a Post Doctoral researcher at Carleton
> university, Ottawa, Canada. I would like to use the
> IPOPT solver to evaluate some of my research. Could
> you please let me know how can I download a trial
> version of the solver for windows XP OS.

IPOPT is released as open source software, but it requires a few third
party components.  Those are free for academic purposes, but we cannot
give them away (also not in compiled form).  Therefore, we cannot offer
precompiles versions of IPOPT, but it should be easy to compile a version
yourself.

IPOPT is available at the COIN-OR website at www.coin-or.org/Ipopt.  There
you can get the last "official" release of Ipopt.  However, I have been
working on an improved version, and I hope to be able to release it soon.
I'm actually looking for some beta testers, so I would be very grateful if
you were willing to try the beta version (which at least in my experiments
performs better anyway, and the installation is much easier) and let me
know how it works for you or what could be improved.

IPOPT has been developed on UNIX-like platforms, but it also compiles
under Windows.  In fact, yesterday I have finally obtained a copy of the
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 with the Intel Fortran Compiler 8.0, so
that I hope to be able to distribute project files for those compilers.
(By the way, IPOPT is written in Fortran 77 for the most part.)

Using Cywgin (A Unix/Linux like environment for Windows) it is possible
however to compile IPOPT using makefiles, and a 'configure' script will
automatically take care of the configuration (even for native Windows
compilers like Visual C++ and Intel Fortran it seems).  Cygwin includes
the GNU compiler suite, so that you can compile Fortran with those, even
if you don't have a native compiler.  (I thought that the native
compilers would provide faster code, but some initial tests yesterday
didn't seem to confirm this - but this is just an initial impression.)
By the way, Cygwin is also free.

So, if you are interested in trying the beta version, please let me know
for what purpose you want to use IPOPT (i.e. are you planning to build an
AMPL solver, or do you want to link it to you problem statement writen in
Fortran or C).

Also, if anyone else reading this message is interested in trying the beta
version (Windows or not), please send an email to andreasw at watson.ibm.com.

Many thanks,

Andreas