Parallel processing with academic license

[kostas syranidis]

I have installed gurobi on a single windows machine with a free academic license.

In the license it is stated that:
"Perpetual Named-User – Unlimited-Use, Single-Machine License: This license is locked to a particular physical machine and its use is restricted to a single identified person. That person is allowed an unlimited number of simultaneous uses."

However, when I spawn several simultaneous optimizations with MPI (I have 8 cores) , the performance is not changing from the serial case.

My question is if I am restricted from the academic license to use gurobi only from one core at a time and not simultaneously.

Best,
Kostas

[Daniel Espinoza]

Hi Kostas,

Gurobi academic licences don't have any type of (performance) restrictions. In fact, by default, gurobi will try to use all resources available when possible.

Where you limiting the number of threads by a parameter maybe? Also, bear in mind that some parts of the algorithm are not parallel, so you may see a drop in utilization at some points of the algorithm.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Daniel

[kostas syranidis]

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for the quick reply.

Maybe I should have stated my question in a better way. Using multiple threads with gurobi for a single optimization is no problem. What I am trying to do is solving multiple 1-thread optimizations simultaneously. However, it seems that solving them in parallel does not differ significantly than executing all of them sequentially one after the other.

That is why I thought that this might be a license issue, since there is also an academic version for clusters that costs more.

With kind regards,
Kostas

[Daniel Espinoza]

Hi Kostas,

Do you mean that multi-thread performance is similar to single-thread performance? or that one default setting is similar to multiple 1-thread runs (on average)?

Regarding cluster licences, AFAIK you can get an academic cluster licence (with the same capabilities as the comercial one). There are some extra conditions, but is a matter of asking.

Best,

Daniel

[kostas syranidis]

Dear Daniel,

Thank you very much for your time. I wanted to check if the license is the problem before trying to investigate it more and from the answers I get, this should not be the case.

Therefore, I took a closer look to my code and it appears that the problem is probably in the serialization of the object I used to communicated the data among the processes.

I will check it again with better data structures and post again if I find an issue but for the moment I believe that the license is fine.

Regards,
Kostas