450.soplex
SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark Description

Benchmark Name

450.soplex


Benchmark Author

Roland Wunderling, Thorsten Koch, Tobias Achterberg
koch [at] zib.de


Benchmark Program General Category

Simplex Linear Program (LP) Solver


Benchmark Description

450.soplex is based on SoPlex Version 1.2.1. SoPlex solves a linear program using the Simplex algorithm.

The LP is given as a sparse m by n matrix A, together with a right hand side vector b of dimension m and an objective function coefficient vector c of dimension n. In general, the problem is to find the vector x to:

                                                                      
minimize  c'x                                                        
subject to Ax  <= b                                              
with        x  >= 0 .                                             

In practice, x may also have upper bounds and the A(i,.)x <= b(i) constraints could also be greater-than-or-equal-to constraints or equality constraints (where A(i,.) is row i of the matrix A).

Note that the matrix A is rather sparse in practice. Therefore SoPlex, like most other implementations of the simplex algorithm, employs algorithms for sparse linear algebra, in particular a sparse LU-Factorization and appropriate solving routines for the resulting triangular equation systems.

c'x is known as the objective function.


Input Description

For SoPlex, the input files can be in either MPS file format or CPLEX LP file format.

The input files provided with 450.soplex are in MPS format and predominately define transportation planning models. The input data files are all from public domain sources. An overview of the input files of size test, train and ref (reference) is:

The PDS train and ref input files are military airlift models and part of the "Kennington" problems described in "An Empirical Evaluation of the KORBX Algorithms for Military Airlift Applications" by W. J. Carolan, J. E. Hill, J. L. Kennington, S. Niemi, S. J. Wichmann (Operations Research vol. 38, no. 2 (1990), pp. 240-248). The pds-20 and pds-50 models were obtained from Hans Mittelman's website Benchmarks for Optimization Software and, in particular, here.

The 'rail' problems (rail582 and rail2586) are described at J. E. Beasley's OR Library and they can be obtained from Mittelmann's rail directory. These data files arise from an application in Italian railways and have been contributed by Paolo Nobili. They are instances of the "set-covering" class of problems and have a number of special characteristics, specifically:

Only the 'test' model is solved to full optimality. In order to provide a consistent workload across CPU architectures and FP precision levels, the train and ref datasets are solved until an iteration limit is reached. The models are not necessarily close to optimality at the stopping point.


Output Description

The *.out files have value of the objective function for the optimal solution (as for the test input) or the value of the objective function after the iteration limit (the -mNNNN command line parameter) has been reached (as for the train and ref inputs). The *.stderr output files are just additional output files, their presence does not indicate an error in the run. They list the total number of iterations; the number of iterations that used the Enter and Leave algorithms; and the number of factorizations performed before the program terminated.


Programming Language

ANSI C++


Known portability issues

none


Problems fixed subsequent to the release of SPEC CPU2006 V1.0


References


Last updated: $Date: 2011-08-16 18:23:17 -0400 (Tue, 16 Aug 2011) $