The NEOS Server is an Internet-based client-server application that provides free access to a library of optimization solvers. Its library of solvers includes more than 60 commercial, free and open source solvers, which can be applied to

mathematical optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

problems of more than 12 different types, including

linear programming Linear programming (LP), also called linear optimization, is a method to achieve the best outcome (such as maximum profit or lowest cost) in a mathematical model whose requirements are represented by linear function#As a polynomial function, li ...

, integer programming and nonlinear optimization. The server is managed by the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most of the solvers are hosted by the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where jobs run on a cluster of high-performance machines managed by the

HTCondor HTCondor is an open-source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks. It can be used to manage workload on a dedicated cluster of computers, or to farm out wor ...

software. A smaller number of solvers are hosted by partner organizations:

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the ...

, the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, and the University of Minho in Portugal. The server was developed in 1996 by the Optimization Technology Center of

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory operated by University of Chicago, UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facil ...

and Northwestern University. Overview of the NEOS Server

Structure

The NEOS (Network-Enabled Optimization System) project was launched in at Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University to develop a method to share optimization software resources over the Internet. The server went live in 1996, one of the first examples of software as a service. The NEOS Server is an Internet-based client-server application that provides access to a library of optimization solvers. The server accepts optimization models described in modeling languages, programming languages, and problem-specific formats. Most of the linear programming, integer programming and nonlinear programming solvers accept input from AMPL and/or GAMS. Jobs can be submitted via a web page, email,

XML RPC XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Edition. ...

, Kestrel or indirectly via third party submission tools SolverStudio for Excel, OpenSolver,

Pyomo Pyomo is a collection of Python software packages for formulating optimization models. Pyomo was developed by William Hart and Jean-Paul Watson at Sandia National Laboratories and David Woodruff at University of California, Davis. Significant ...

, JuMP (through the Julia package NEOS) and the

R package R packages are extensions to the R statistical programming language. R packages contain code, data, and documentation in a standardised collection format that can be installed by users of R, typically via a centralised software repository such as ...

rneos. NEOS uses the HTCondor software to manage the workload on a dedicated cluster of computers.

References

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External links

NEOS Server
official site of the NEOS Server
NEOS Guide
official site of the NEOS Guide Mathematical optimization software