Hi Marcus,
I'm not sure I'm the Paul to which this was addressed, but I'm happy to chip in (pun deliberate). No, I'm not aware of CPLEX-specific hardware benchmarks. To the best of my knowledge, CPLEX does not exploit GPUs, although a fairly recent announcement suggests that may be coming someday (likely not soon). If I were shopping for a computer with CPLEX performance on large MIPs in mind, I would look at the usual three suspects: CPU speed; number of CPU cores; and RAM. I think CPU speed would be top of mind. Between RAM and number of cores, it's a bit less clear. I think parallelization yields decreasing returns as you crank up the core count. At the same time, I would assume that at some point extra RAM would stop paying for itself. Also, you can somewhat compensate for RAM by getting a fast, decent size SSD internal disk (where CPLEX would swap out chunks of the tree).
There's also an interaction term in the "model". To exploit more cores, you may need more RAM, because parallel threads get copies of chunks of the tree. So RAM usage goes up with thread count. Unfortunately, I have no idea of what an ideal ratio of RAM to cores would be.
Paul
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Paul Rubin
Professor Emeritus
Michigan State University
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Original Message:
Sent: Tue April 29, 2025 08:29 AM
From: Marcus Garvie
Subject: recommendations for CPLEX hardware
Hi Paul,
you helped me in the past, thank you. I was hoping I could ask your advice about the best kind of computer (laptop probably) for running CPLEX fast, to solve large integer linear programming problems, that are pure feasibility problem.
I understand that CPLEX might not be running optimally on Mac based chips (my laptop has the M1 chip). So to get the best performance it seems from what I read that an intel based computer is best?
Are you aware of benchmarks for different computers/chips ? I think I will try and buy a computer specifically for running CPLEX.
Thank you for any advice you can give!
Regards,
Marcus.
________________________________
Dr. Marcus R Garvie
Associate Professor
Rm 552 MacNaughton Bldg
Dept. of Math & Stats
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON Canada N1G 2W1
Tel. 519-824-4120 ext 53409