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Overview
The NEOS-SRN server is an installation of NEOS on Sandia's restricted network.
The NEOS server technology was developed by Argonne National Laboratory to
provide remote optimization services over the internet. Some
of the initial goals of the NEOS project were:
- to make effective connections with users of optimization technology,
- to give users the information they need to formulate their problems
correctly and to choose the right pieces of software for solving them,
- and to provide a mechanism for users to experiment with a variety of
optimization tools without having to buy and install them independently.
See the NEOS article in OR/MS Today.
In addition, the development of the NEOS-SRN server was motivated by the following goals:
- to enable Sandia analysts to launch large-scale parallel optimization
solvers without having to install and run the parallel software themselves,
- to facilitate the use of optimization interfaces like AMPL, which allow
the formulation of structured problem formulations (as opposed to the black-box problems that can be solved with tools like DAKOTA),
- to enable the use of remote optimization tools in a more secure
environment (e.g. for applications with sensitive data),
- to facilitate the use of optimization technology developed on
UNIX platforms by end-users running Windows, thereby avoiding the costs of
porting and maintaining the software on multiple platforms.
Status
An initial deployment of the NEOS-SRN server was setup in April of 2002 on Sandia's internal network. This server was used primarily for testing and the application of LP and MIP solvers within 9200. This server was used to identified a variety of
security hurdles that need to be overcome to launch jobs on Sandia's HPC compute resources. Specifically, the need to authenticate users with kerberose and to pass on these credentials to the selected HPC compute resource.
A secure NEOS server is being developed at
This server employs a secure web server that performs kerberose authentification. By April of 2004, this server supported LP and MIP solvers on internal LANs as well as the ASCI Red supercomputer.
The server currently supports the following solvers
- Parallel and serial mixed integer linear programming using PICO
- Linear programming using PICO's LP solvers
This work is currently supported by the ASCI Problem Solving Environment, and has received pervious support from the ASCI Computer Science Research Foundation.
Team Members
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