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Note: This software, like all software in H:\Contrib, is user-contributed and is unsupported by CTC staff. The contributor may be willing to provide some assistance with this software.

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H:\Contrib\APPSpack contains two versions of a port to Windows of the library APPSpack: Asynchronous Parallel Pattern Search.

See http://software.sandia.gov/appspack/version4.0/index.html for further information about the package and its usage. The folder also contains programs appspack_serial and appspack_mpi that may be used with external user-written objective function programs.

Both debug (unoptimized) release (optimized) versions of the libraries and programs are provided. Debug versions have a 'd' at the end of their name.

The libraries were compiled and tested by John Zollweg. The Microsoft C++ compiler was used in building both libraries, but because the library built with the v 14.00 compiler (Visual Studio 2005) will not link with code compiled with the v 13.10 compiler (Visual Studio 2003), both are provided until VS 2005 is more widely available. The libraries for use with VS 2003 has a 3 near the end of their names. The Intel C++  compiler v 9.1 will not compile the library because of a bug, which has been reported to Intel. For that reason, it is not recommended that this library be used with the Intel C++ compiler.

To facilite use of the libraries to build programs that incorporate objective functions and APPSpack all in one executable, the header files used for building the library are in the /include directory. These are slightly different from the ones in the distribution from Sandia. The "all in one" example programs seem to run much faster than the ones that use external objective function programs. This advantage presumably become less important as the cost of the objective function evaluation increases.

The library was built using mpi.h from MPI/Pro 1.7.0. Serial (and of course, parallel) example programs using the library require that mpipro.lib be provided to the linker, even though no MPI parallel functions are called.