Hello, A new project on the LCRC cluster has been requested. Please forward the information on to the LCRC Allocation sub-committee. Applicant's name: Ashutosh Mahajan Applicant's institution: ANL Applicant's division: MCS Project Name: MINOTAUR Project title: Next-Generation Solvers for Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programs: Structure, Search, and Implementation Associated funding: DOE, through grant DE-FG02-05ER25694. Other Systems: None Science: One of our objectives in this project is to develop powerful algorithmic frameworks to solve previously intractable mixed-integer nonlinear programs (MINLPs). Another is to deliver implementations of these frameworks in new, publicly available solvers. Towards these ends, we are developing the solver MINOTAUR that can solve such problems found in many diverse applications. The difficulty and consequently, the solution time for these problems grow exponentially in the size of the input. Our objective is to harness the parallel processing machines to solve these problems in reasonable time. Another important part of this development is experimenting with many different algorithms and parameters in order to identify the best operating parameters based on the problem structure. Project description: We have developed over the last year, a solver named MINOTAUR, that can be used to solve medium size MINLP instances on a single processor. We are now in the stage of making it robust for ill posed problems and also adaptive to the type and structure of the problem. This effort requires extensive testing on a large set (over 300) of instances. Each test requires up to 500 core-hours and many such tests are required. While the first stage described above requires embarrassingly-parallel execution of several single-processor jobs, it is critical for the next stage of making MINOTAUR capable of harnessing distributed memory architectures. MINOTAUR solves MINLPs by a branch-and-bound methods, where the problem is divided recursively into smaller and smaller subproblems. Each subproblem is in turn a small MINLP that can be solved using the serial-processing techniques that have already been developed, but need tuning as described previously. The code being developed is written in C, C++ and Fortran. We are using MPI for the parallel implementation. I have already used my initial start-up allocation in some tests, and all the required libraries and code seem to compile and run fine. Project URL: Requested allocation: 50000 Justification: The requester has used 7519 hours of their initial startup project. In addition to approving an initial amount, please specify a Category and Subcategory for this project. For a list of the current selection of approved categories, please see: https://wiki.lcrc.anl.gov/wiki/Processes/Categories Once the Allocation committee has approved the project, please go to the Project Management page to create it: https://accounts.lcrc.anl.gov/projects.php Thank You, The LCRC Accounts System