[Ipopt] new MUMPS release coming soon

[Tony Kelman]

Is the prerelease source in public version control somewhere? Do they have 
an actual build system now?

If there's anything we can start working on, then we should make a new major 
version of BuildTools/ThirdParty/Mumps to get the build harness ready.

Not that the core Ipopt code is ever really a bottleneck, but if you want to 
do threading there, may as well skip OpenMP and go straight to C++11 threads 
for that. But then you might as well call it Ipopt 4.0 and really go nuts 
with it...

-Tony


-----Original Message----- 
From: Damien
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2015 7:37 PM
To: ipopt at list.coin-or.org
Subject: [Ipopt] new MUMPS release coming soon

All,

MUMPS 5.0 is in beta testing.  It's more or less a rewrite, and includes
some great new features, like OpenMP solver parallelism in addition to
what you can have from BLAS.  The interface hasn't changed though, so
it's a drop-in replacement in IPOPT.  So far it works quite well (on
Windows and Linux) and I haven't found any problem in IPOPT that solves
with 4.x and fails on the beta. There's obviously going to be some
teething issues, and the OpenMP parallelism is brand-new, but it's a
step towards a fully open-source, multicore linear solver option for
Windows, Linux and Mac.  When the OpenMP version of Metis 5.1 is stable,
there can be multicore analysis and reordering as well on the linear solve.

It's a bigger, more complicated compilation than MUMPS 4.x, with about
twice as many files and a few more module dependencies.  That will have
some impact on COIN-OR as a whole, there's a few solvers that use the
MUMPS wrapper now.  This is a good opportunity to look at the MUMPS
interface in IPOPT and tweak it to allow access to features that MUMPS
5.0 provides.  I'm still listed as the MUMPS interface guy for IPOPT,
and I'm happy to be responsible for anything required to get MUMPS 5.0
integrated into IPOPT.  There isn't a public release date for the new
version, it will be released when the devs are happy, but I'd be
surprised if it wasn't ready by March.  Now is a good time to start
pressuring your supervisor for a new workstation.

Might be time to think about OpenMP in the IPOPT core code too.  You
know, just saying... :-)

Cheers,

Damien
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