[Help-glpk] Parallel runs of glpk

[Mathieu Dutour]

I am interested in running glpk from a multithreaded program.

The goal is not to have GLPK itself parallel but instead to

have glpk used many times by different threads for solving

many different linear programs.

As is well known glpk is not thread safe and my question

is about alternative solution to that problem. Here are some

possibilities:

A) One is to have to run glpsol standalone by running it

as external program with the input file generated by the thread

and then read by the thread. But this solution has its costs

in terms of runtime. It is easy to program.

B) Have one thread that does only call glpk. It is adequate

in single threaded performance but potentially expensive 

since some thread may wait. Relatively easy to program.

C) Use shared memory to exchange data. That is multiple

number of individual programs running glpk and getting their

data from shared memory.

Any other solution? Is there any implementation that you

would recommend?

  Mathieu