Gekko for AWS EC2 ARM instances

[Alex Bakker]

Hello All

Firstly, a big thank you to everyone who works on Gekko. It is a truly impressive piece of technology.

To date I have been using Gekko to optimize reinforcement learning problems on AWS t2/t3 (x86 based) EC2 instances. This is working well.

The other day I was checking to make sure I was still using the most appropriate instance type (as it seems AWS is always introducing new types). The article below

https://www.learnaws.org/2020/12/19/t3-t3a-t4g/

made me wonder if I should consider using the t4g (ARM based) type. After making a few environment changes I was able to get my infrastructure working.... with the exception of

m = GEKKO(remote=False)

optimization. For example, the problem

https://gekko.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples.html#hs-71-benchmark

works fine with its remote=True setting. However, setting remote=False is a crash at line 2097 of gekko.py at

https://github.com/BYU-PRISM/GEKKO/blob/master/gekko/gekko.py

Note that my python environment is

sys.platform     'linux'

os.uname()[4]    'aarch64'

The code between lines 2080 and 2095 suggests that it is only looking for Raspberry Pi version of ARM where os.uname()[4].startswith("arm").

Therefore, I think it is simply the case that Gekko is not currently setup for this version of ARM.

Normally I would stand down at this point .... however..... the following points

1. AWS is backing ARM (now pushing their third generation of graviton chips);

2. the instances are significantly cheaper than comparable t2/t3 (x86) variants; and

3. the t4g ARM instances use less power

all encourage me to want to be able to purse local optimization on an ARM architecture with GEKKO.

I am very keen to know if this might be on the horizon. Thank you again for all the great work.

Alex

[John Hedengren]

Alex,

 

Thanks for that suggestion and interesting application! I’ve added the local solve option as a feature request: https://github.com/BYU-PRISM/GEKKO/issues/160 The local APM is also compiled for Apple Silicon M1 with an Arm-based architecture. I’ll need to check on the maturity of Fortran and C++ compilers for t4g ARM.

 

Best regards,

 

John Hedengren

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