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Published in:
2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Parallelization of the FICO Xpress-Optimizer
Authors : Timo Berthold, James Farmer, Stefan Heinz, Michael Perregaard
Published in: Mathematical Software – ICMS 2016
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Abstract
Many optimization problems arising in practice can be modeled as mixed integer programs (MIPs). In this paper, we present the new parallelization concept for the state-of-the-art MIP solver FICO Xpress-Optimizer. A natural precondition to achieving reasonabling speedups from parallelization is maintaining a high workload of the available computational resources. At the same time, reproducibility and reliability are key requirements for mathematical optimization software; solvers like the FICO Xpress-Optimizer are expected to be deterministic. The resulting synchronization latencies render the goal of a satisfying workload a challenge in itself.
We address this challenge by following a partial information approach and separating the concepts of simultaneous tasks and independent threads from each other. Our computational results indicate that this leads to a much higher CPU workload and thereby to an improved scaling on modern high-performance CPUs. As an added value, the solution path that the FICO Xpress-Optimizer takes is not only deterministic in a fixed environment, but, to a certain extent, thread-independent.