[Ipopt] MUMPS vs. MA57 and Netlib vs. system BLAS on Mac

[Ray Zimmerman]

I did a number of tests to compare the performance of the various IPOPT Matlab MEX file builds I did on Mac OS X, and some of the results surprised me. My test problems were 4 different optimal power flow problems for electricity grids, ranging in size from ~700 vars and ~1400 constraints to ~50,000 vars and ~110,000 constraints. Here is what I found.

1. NETLIB BLAS/LAPACK was on average about 30% slower than the optimized version in the Accelerate/vecLib framework. The difference was much greater (about 100%) on the larger models.

2. MUMPS is noticeably faster (over 50% in some cases) than MA57 on the larger models, and vice versa for the smaller models. On average they were about the same.

The second result baffles me. I thought MA57 was expected to be significantly better than MUMPS. Am I missing something? Anybody have any ideas?

Info on exactly how I'm building MA57 is here: http://list.coin-or.org/pipermail/ipopt/2011-October/002623.html

-- 
Ray Zimmerman
Senior Research Associate
419A Warren Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
phone: (607) 255-9645




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