Parampl: A Simple Tool for Parallel and Distributed Execution of AMPL Programs

Due to the physical processor frequency scaling constraint, current computer systems are equipped with more and more processing units. Therefore, parallel computing has become an important paradigm in the recent years. This paper presents Parampl, a simple tool for parallel and distributed execution of AMPL programs. AMPL is a comprehensive algebraic modeling language for formulating optimization problems. However, AMPL itself does not support defining tasks to be executed in parallel. Although the parallelism is often provided by solvers, in many cases, it is more efficient to formulate the problem in a decomposed way and apply various problem specific enhancements. Parampl introduces explicit asynchronous execution of AMPL subproblems from within the program code. Such an extension yields a new view on AMPL programs, where a programmer is able to define complex, parallelized optimization tasks and formulate algorithms solving optimization subproblems in parallel or in a distributed manner.