The Gurobi linear programming solver is installed on the Niagara software stack.

"Given a set of linear inequality/equality constraints, Ax>=b, where A is a matrix and x & b are vectors, what is the set of variables x (within a given range) that maximizes/minimizes a target objective function f(x)?"

Such a model is very common in scientific computation, engineering, and business. If the variables x are (partially) limited to integers, this becomes Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) which is a much more sophisticated problem. Gurobi, along with other solvers (such as "linprog" and "intlinprog" in MATLAB) can solve such LP/MIP problems efficiently. And for Gurobi, for instance, efficient multi-threading (and even distributed computation, depending on the license) capabilities are also implemented for parallelism and easy scaling for large models.

Getting a license

The University of Toronto has a free academic license to use Gurobi. Access to the license is granted by loading the Gurobi module.

Running using the Niagara installation

Gurobi 7.5.2

Commercial modules can only be accessed using the 'module use' command.

module use /scinet/niagara/software/commercial/modules
module load gurobi/7.5.2

Using Gurobi

To use Gurobi, one only needs to include "gurobi_c++.h" in the source file, and use the compilation/linking flags:

CXXLIB=-L ${SCINET_GUROBI_LIB} -lgurobi_g++5.2 -lgurobi75 -fopenmp
CXXINC=-I ${SCINET_GUROBI_INC} -fopenmp

The actual documentation of using its APIs can be found here.

Running Gurobi

Example submission script for a job running on 2 nodes, with max walltime of 11 hours:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --nodes=2
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=40
#SBATCH --time=11:00:00
#SBATCH --job-name test

module use /scinet/niagara/software/commercial/modules
module load ansys/19.0

# DIRECTORY TO RUN - $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR is directory job was submitted from
cd $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR

machines=`srun bash -c 'hostname -s' | sort | uniq | awk '{print $1 ":" 40}' | paste -s -d ':'`
ansys190 -b -j JOBNAME -ppf aa_r -dis -machines $machines -i ansys.in

Running using the CC installation

Ansys 19.0

To access the CC software stack you must unload the Niagara stack.

module load CCEnv
module load ansys/19.0

You can run the script given in the previous section by substituting the previous module commands with the above two.

Gurobi

Contents