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acro-dakota 1.0 (stable)

Acro integrates a rich variety of optimization libraries and solvers
that have been developed for large-scale engineering and scientific
applications. Acro was developed to facilitate the design, development,
integration and support of optimization software libraries. Thus, Acro
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.

The acro-dakota project contains the subset of Acro components that 
are integrated into the DAKOTA optimization toolkit.

See the Acro home page for further details about the capabilities that
are integrated into Acro:  http://software.sandia.gov/Acro

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Acro Lead Developer.

William E. Hart
Sandia National Laboratories
wehart@sandia.gov 

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License.

Acro is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
However, packages integrated into Acro may used different licesnse.
See the Acro home page:  http://software.sandia.gov/Acro

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Installation.

Details for the Acro installation process is described in
acro/doc/INSTALL.  The command

  cd acro
  ./setup configure build

will work for a simple build that does not rely on external software packages.

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Dependencies.

Acro integrates third-party libraries that are used to support
optimization and other analyses (e.g. open-source linear programming
solvers).  Acro is not strictly dependent on any other external software
packages.  The parallel solvers are dependent on MPI (using the mpich
library).

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Platforms.

This package is quite generic and thus it should compile on a wide range
of platforms.  Acro is actively supported with nightly build verifications
on a variety of platforms.  See

  http://software.sandia.gov/Acro

for links to the latest nightly build test report.

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Further Information and Help.

Send email to acro-help@software.sandia.gov to address specific issues
in the use of Acro.  Online documentation is available at

  http://software.sandia.gov/Acro

The 'Documentation' link provides information on Acro as well as several
Acro projects.

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WARNING.

Many packages in Acro are "research" codes, and thus Acro is
the subject of continuing active development.  Bug reports, suggestions
for improvement, and required changes for other machines/compilers
are welcome.  Direct all messages to acro-help@software.sandia.gov.
