TAO: Toolkit for Advanced Optimization


Please visit our updated web page at http://www.mcs.anl.gov/tao.


The TAO project focuses on the development of software for large-scale optimization problems. TAO uses an object-oriented design to create a flexible toolkit with strong emphasis on the reuse of external tools where appropriate. Our design enables bi-directional connection to lower level linear algebra support (for example, parallel sparse matrix data structures) as well as higher level application frameworks.


Overview

The Toolkit for Advanced Optimization (TAO) is aimed at the solution of large-scale optimization problems on high-performance architectures. Our main goals are portability, performance, scalable parallelism, and an interface independent of the architecture.

TAO is suitable for both single-processor and massively-parallel architectures. The current version of TAO has algorithms for unconstrained and bound-constrained optimization. We are working on extending the toolkit to nonlinearly constrained problems.

TAO is funded through the Department of Energy's Office of Science (MICS Division) and is part of the  ACTS Toolkit .

Further Information

  • TAO Documentation
  • Benchmarks
  • Impact
  • Referencing TAO
  • Papers
  • GPCG: A Case Study in the Performance and Scalability of Optimization Algorithms
  • Talks
  • TAO - Toolkit for Advanced Optimization, Sixth Copper Mountain Conference, April 3, 2000
  • Parallel Software for Large-Scale Optimization, SIAM CSE Conference, September 23, 2000
  • Tutorials
  • TAO Introduction - NERSC, September 29, 2000
  • Example programs
  • Developers

  • Steve Benson
  • Lois Curfman McInnes
  • Jorge Moré
  • Jason Sarich
  • We work in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory.

    Download TAO

    The current release (Version 1.6) of TAO can be obtained by entering your email address below (so that you can be informed of future TAO software updates) and downloading the compressed tar file that contains the software.

    Email: .

    Check the documentation for the latest installation instructions.

    Contact Us:

    For further information please send email to tao-comments@mcs.anl.gov

    User Mailing List:

    To receive information about new releases and other news concerning TAO, joing the TAO news mailing list by sending an email to majordomo@mcs.anl.gov with the message "subscribe tao-news".

         To: majordomo@mcs.anl.gov
         Subject:  <anything -- it will be ignored>
         subscribe tao-news

    Subscriber can expect only a couple emails per year.

    Related Work

    Related projects at Argonne include our work on Advanced Optimization Technology.   Related projects that employ object-based optimization technology include

  • COOOL
  • OPT++
  • The Hilbert Class Library