Optimizing Your Tax Dollars

Government agencies are usually viewed as "takers," as in they take tax dollars, rather than "givers," as in giving us back something of value. In fact, we usually get back more than what's taken, considering highways, schools, and the like. And now, Sandia National Labs is giving back a little more.

Sandia is doing this with the release of its freely available Acro 1.0 optimization software. Developed by a team led by Bill Hart, Acro (which is short for "A Common Repository for Optimizers") integrates a number of optimization libraries and solvers that have been developed for large-scale engineering and scientific applications.

Since Acro was developed to facilitate the design, development, integration, and support of optimization software libraries, it includes both individual optimization solvers as well as optimization frameworks that provide abstract interfaces for flexible interoperability of solver components. Furthermore, many solvers included in Acro can exploit parallel computing resources to solve optimization problems more quickly.

"Acro puts together different optimization software applications into one large package, making it easier to solve large-scale engineering and scientific problems," says Hart.

Hart and his team have been developing Acro for the past year-and-a-half. Both Sandia-developed and off-the-shelf software are included in Acro. In particular, Acro integrates Sandia’s APPSPACK, Coliny, OPT++, and PICO optimization software. Acro includes optimization techniques like linear programming, mixed-integer linear programming, derivative-free local search, and genetic algorithms.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:31 AM  Permalink