Using CPLEX

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ILOG CPLEX: Linear, Integer and Quadratic Programming Software

Here's the email explaining CPLEX usage from Dave Brent. Any questions go to him. Before using it, please check with Kevin Leyton-Brown, who bought this software. We only have 22 licenses, and it's possible that Kevin and his students will be using all of them. (If you do manage to get a license when we don't expect anyone else to be using it, it's possible that some jobs in the queue won't run, forcing us to sift through logs to see what didn't get run.)

People currently using CPLEX:

• Frank Hutter
• Erik Zawadzki
• Mirela Andronescu (1-3 licences every once in a while)

Using CPLEX will be somewhat iterative, I think, since there wasn't really much to installing it, and so it doesn't really hook in all that well to our software structure. If you find there are things that you are doing everytime you run it (environment variables you set, PATH settings, etc), let me know and perhaps we can make those things more automatic.

For now ...

use cplex-10.1.1

(note, the version number may change. You can find out what versions are supported by typing use -L.)

cplex

will fire it up. It appears to want to create cplex.log in the current directory. We have 22 floating "tokens", and it should be available to run on any Linux machine in the department that has /cs/local mounted. If you want to go find the files themselves, they're actually in

/cs/local/generic/lib/pkg/ilog

(... /pkg/cplex-9.1 is just a link to that)

There is also a "convert" program if anyone has any use for that. It'll be in your path after the "use" command.

If you want to make your own LPs or IPs manually, here's an example test file that you can model your input after:

• 000000.lp: An example of using integer programming with cplex

Note that it doesn't come with binaries that are explicitly for the system we're running (SuSE 9.1). It comes with binaries for

Redhat Enterprise 3.0 for x86, x86-64 and ia64 Redhat Enterprise 2.1 for x86 SuSE (?) 9.0 for x86-64

We are using the binaries for Redhat Enterprise 3.0 for x86. Let us know if you run into any problems that might be caused by this.

There is also a package called "concert" (version 2.1), which appears to be libraries. I haven't done anything about making this automatically available. For now, it's in /cs/local/generic/lib/pkg/ilog/concert21. If this is something that will be used and should be made more easily available, let me know. (this may relate to the environment variables comment above)

The license manager will not restart if the host it's on reboots, but that will be fixed soon.

I have copied the documentation from the CD to http://www.cs.ubc.ca/%7Ebrent/Docs/ILOG/doc

-- KevinLeytonBrown - 25 May 2006