Re: [Help-glpk] Parallel runs of glpk

[Meketon, Marc]

For what it is worth, I and my team-mates have done your option A before and it has worked fine.  The only slight complication is that we had to regulate the number of simultaneous processes.  In our usage, we run glpsol.exe via a “system” call (it’s called different things in different languages).  You can also decide the level of data abstraction – do you build MPS files that are quick to process but take longer to program, or do you build *.dat files and use MathProg?

 

In our application, we had not worried about memory, and perhaps you have to.  We needed to have our driver application be 32-bit because it was connected to 32-bit Excel dll’s, but by running glpsol.exe via “system” calls we could call the 64-bit version of the solver.

 

-Marc

 

From: Help-glpk [mailto:help-glpk-bounces+address@hidden On Behalf Of Mathieu Dutour
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2016 9:07 AM
To: address@hidden
Subject: [Help-glpk] Parallel runs of glpk

 

I am interested in running glpk from a multithreaded program.

The goal is not to have GLPK itself parallel but instead to

have glpk used many times by different threads for solving

many different linear programs.

 

As is well known glpk is not thread safe and my question

is about alternative solution to that problem. Here are some

possibilities:

 

A) One is to have to run glpsol standalone by running it

as external program with the input file generated by the thread

and then read by the thread. But this solution has its costs

in terms of runtime. It is easy to program.

 

B) Have one thread that does only call glpk. It is adequate

in single threaded performance but potentially expensive 

since some thread may wait. Relatively easy to program.

 

C) Use shared memory to exchange data. That is multiple

number of individual programs running glpk and getting their

data from shared memory.

 

Any other solution? Is there any implementation that you

would recommend?

 

  Mathieu

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