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COLIN.

COLIN provides a C++ software interface for optimization libraries. This
interface is quite generic, and COLIN has been design to facilitate the
development of hybrid optimizers.

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

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License.

COLIN is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.  It is
free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version.  A copy of this license is included in the LICENSE file,
and is also available online from http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html.
Also refer to the COPYRIGHT file for important U.S. Government legal
notices.

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Overview.

Many C++ optimization software libraries have been developed.  However,
these designs invariably incorporate specific features that facilitate
the development and application of the author's algorithms.  By contrast,
COLIN is intended to provide a generic interface for optimizers that is
simple to use and which can encapsulate the basic algorithmic interface
of a wide range of general-purpose optimizers.  As such, COLIN can be
used as 'middle-ware' to facilitate the interface of an optimizer to (a)
other optimizers in to form hybrid solution strategies and (b) to generic
user-interfaces like AMPL or Excel, for which well-defined APIs exist.

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Installation.

No installation instructions are provided with COLIN.

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Dependencies

COLIN is currently distributed with the Coliny optimization library. This
code has been compiles with Coliny on a wide-range of platforms.

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Platforms.

This package is quite generic and thus it should compile on a wide range
of platforms.  It has been actively tested on the following platforms:

  SUN      Solaris 2.8                CC v5.0         MPICH

  SGI      IRIX 6.5                   CC v7.3.1.2     SGI MPI

  DEC      OSF 4.0                    cxx v6.3        Digital MPI

  TFLOP    Cougar   (compute)         ciCC v4.0       MPICH
           TFLOP OS (service)         iCC  v4.0       MPICH

  PC       Red Hat LINUX 6.2/7.1      g++/egcs v.96   MPICH
           Cygwin 1.3.x               g++/gcc v.96    MPICH

Currently, the presence of gmake is required to successfully compile
on HP, SGI, and DEC platforms.

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Versions.

This release is version 1.0.

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Documentation.

No documentation is current provided.

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WARNING: This is a RESEARCH code and 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 wehart@sandia.gov.