We are pleased to announce the addition of NVIDIA cuOpt to the COIN-OR repository on Github. cuOpt is an open source library implementing GPU-accelerated algorithms for optimization. The addition of cuOpt to the COIN-OR repository follows the announcement of COIN-OR’s collaboration with NVIDIA, which you can read about here.
Optimization has always been at the core of computational research, and now, a new frontier is emerging—one where open-source innovation meets GPU acceleration. COIN-OR and NVIDIA are collaborating to bring NVIDIA cuOpt, a GPU-accelerated optimization engine, into the COIN-OR open-source ecosystem. This collaboration aims to empower researchers, developers, and industry leaders with cutting-edge tools to drive breakthroughs in large-scale optimization.
This is more than just an open-source release—it’s about fostering a dynamic, community-driven ecosystem where experts can push the boundaries of optimization, explore novel GPU-powered techniques, and accelerate real-world impact.
The COIN-OR Foundation was born out of a need: By the late ‘90s, optimization research was advancing rapidly, yet the lack of open-source software was slowing progress. In 2000, IBM launched the COIN-OR Initiative to change that, providing a public repository of open-source tools for optimization. By 2004, COIN-OR had grown into an independent, nonprofit educational foundation, dedicated to fostering a thriving, community-driven ecosystem for computational operations research.
Today, COIN-OR has evolved into a global hub for open innovation, hosting over 70 projects on GitHub and supporting thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide. As a strategic partner of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) Computing Society, COIN-OR organizes annual competitions, workshops, and fosters the development of major open-source projects such as Cbc, Ipopt, and HiGHS. Our mission remains steadfast: to provide the tools and platform for optimization researchers to push the boundaries of computational science.
As the algorithms for workhorse problem classes, such as mixed-integer linear optimization, have matured, the focus of computational research has shifted towards leveraging existing solvers as black-box tools for tackling increasingly complex problem classes, such as multi-stage stochastic optimization, robust optimization, and bilevel optimization.
The rise of machine learning and GPU acceleration has now created new opportunities to reimagine optimization algorithms. By harnessing the massive parallelism of GPUs, classical optimization methods—such as continuous linear optimization—are being revolutionized, enabling faster, more scalable solutions. Early indications suggest that GPU acceleration could lead to entirely new algorithmic breakthroughs, transforming how optimization problems are solved.
At COIN-OR, we believe in building on the past to shape the future and our partnership with NVIDIA marks a milestone in the evolution of open-source optimization. We are thrilled to collaborate with NVIDIA as it releases NVIDIA cuOpt—its GPU-accelerated optimization algorithms—under an open-source license, making it available within the COIN-OR repository.
This partnership isn’t just about making cuOpt open source—it’s about building a vibrant research and development environment, where COIN-OR and NVIDIA will co-sponsor implementation challenges, host dedicated sessions at major conferences, and engage with the broader COIN-OR community.
By combining NVIDIA’s GPU expertise with COIN-OR’s deep roots in open-source optimization, we aim to fuel innovation, accelerate research, and reimagine new possibilities in large-scale optimization.
This is just the beginning. We look forward to the groundbreaking discoveries that will emerge from this partnership. If you are a researcher, developer, or industry leader passionate about optimization, now is the time to get involved—join us as we embark on this exciting journey!
Nominations are solicited for candidates for the position of director
on the Strategic Leadership Board (SLB). All positions are
for three-year terms (through December 31, 2027). Any interested
individual is eligible to be a director of the Foundation.
COIN-OR is evolving rapidly, and directors can have a significant
influence on the development of the Foundation. Candidates should be
actively interested in COIN-OR and committed to active participation
in Foundation business. For more information on the activities of and
expectations for directors, prospective candidates are encouraged to
contact any current directors or the Foundation Secretary
(secretary at coin-or.org).
Note that membership in COIN-OR is not required. Candidates with
expertise in the software industry or experience as a director for a
non-profit organization will be eagerly welcomed.
The Foundation encourages the nomination of any interested individuals,
particularly users of COIN-OR software, who have not previously
been active participants in COIN-OR projects. Diversity of viewpoints
and skills is both needed and appreciated.
For all director positions, a candidate may be nominated by any
interested individual. Self-nomination is encouraged. All nominations
must be seconded by a full member of the Foundation.
Nominations should be emailed to the Secretary (secretary at
coin-or.org) and will be accepted until November 15, 2024. Candidates
must agree to be nominated and will be contacted to provide a short
biography and statement to be distributed to the full members of the
Foundation prior to the election.
We are pleased to announce that Haihao Lu and Jinwen Yang are awarded the 2024 COIN-OR Cup for cuPDLP.jl. This project has demonstrated great novelty by leveraging an underexplored first-order method for linear programming. In addition to delivering promising numerical results on large-scale LP instances, cuPDLP has gained traction in the optimization community, with several solvers already integrating it. Also, cuPDLP actively adopts GPU acceleration techniques, which open the door for significant advancements in computational efficiency. The exceptional contributions made by cuPDLP.jl have advanced the computational infrastructure for linear programming, and we look forward to seeing its continued growth and impact.
Prize Committee: Mihai Anitescu (Argonne National Laboratory), Sungho Shin (MIT), François Pacaud (Université Paris)
If you are attending the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle on October 21, join us to celebrate the winners and the 20th anniversary of the COIN-OR Foundation. Watch the conference’s social media for the time and location.
The COIN-OR Cup recognizes and celebrates the best contributions to open-source operations research software development and use associated with the COIN-OR software collection. To remind you, COIN-OR stands for “COmputational INfrastructure for Operations Research”. It is the definitive collection of free, open-source operations research software that lets you concentrate on your research instead of re-implementing software. See https://www.coin-or.org. Get on board!
GUIDELINES FOR COIN-OR CUP SUBMISSIONS:
A submission or nomination must contain:
1. A synopsis of an effective use of COIN-OR or valuable contribution to COIN-OR (or both!), including an explanation of its significance. Maximum 3 pages (pdf format).
2. Copies of relevant papers or documents (pdf format). We especially encourage nominations describing an effective use of COIN-OR that the community may not know about.
3. A submission to this Google form: https://forms.gle/CmtnpQoCeCXNiPM17
Self-nominations are welcome and encouraged.
Submission deadline: Friday, October 4th 2024.
Please e-mail your submissions to coin-cup-2024@coin-or.org in a single zipped archive, containing a description of your submission and copies of all relevant papers/documents in pdf format.
The winner will be announced and celebrated during the INFORMS annual meeting. Details for the announcement and celebration will be revealed when available.
Congratulations to Robin Lougee, Coin-OR co-founder, for winning the INFORMS Computing Society Distinguished Service Award for 2024. To quote the award announcement: “Robin was a co-creator of the Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) initiative, which was established in 2004 as a strategic partner of the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS). The goal of the COIN-OR initiative is to accelerate the development and adoption of open-source software for computational operations research, a major goal of ICS itself. She was co-recipient of the 2014 INFORMS Impact Prize for this effort, which has been of major benefit to ICS.”
Well done, Robin; it is fantastic to see your contributions over so many years being acknowledged.
COIN-OR Strategic Leadership Board
Nominations are solicited for candidates for the position of director
on the Strategic Leadership Board (SLB). All positions are
for three-year terms (through December 31, 2026). Any interested
individual is eligible to be a director of the Foundation.
COIN-OR is evolving rapidly, and directors can have a significant
influence on the development of the Foundation. Candidates should be
actively interested in COIN-OR and committed to active participation
in Foundation business. For more information on the activities of and
expectations for directors, prospective candidates are encouraged to
contact any current directors or the Foundation Secretary
(secretary at coin-or.org).
Note that membership in COIN-OR is not required. Candidates with
expertise in the software industry or experience as a director for a
non-profit organization will be eagerly welcomed.
The Foundation encourages the nomination of any interested individuals,
particularly users of COIN-OR software, who have not previously
been active participants in COIN-OR projects. Diversity of viewpoints and
skills is both needed and appreciated.
For all director positions, a candidate may be nominated by any
interested individual. Self-nomination is encouraged. All nominations
must be seconded by a full member of the Foundation.
Nominations should be emailed to the Secretary (secretary at coin-
or.org) and will be accepted until January 10, 2024. Candidates must
agree to be nominated and will be contacted to provide a short
biography and statement to be distributed to the full members of the
Foundation prior to the election.
More information on the COIN-OR foundation can be found at
https://www.coin-or.org/about-the-foundation/.
Big congratulations to Sungho Shin, François Pacaud, and Mihai Anitescu for winning the 2023 COIN-OR Cup in a very competitive field with their work ExaModels (https://github.com/sshin23/ExaModels.jl) and MadNLP (https://github.com/MadNLP/MadNLP.jl).
Open-source software packages ExoModels and MadNLP represent a significant breakthrough in efficiently solving large-scale NLPs by leveraging the capabilities of modern GPUs. These packages achieve a remarkable performance enhancement in solving real-world nonlinear optimization problems at scale. A noteworthy example is the recent accomplishment in accelerating alternating current (AC) optimal power flow (OPF) problems by up to a factor of ten compared to state-of-the-art tools.
We were delighted to celebrate the winning nomination at the INFORMS Annual meeting. Thanks to Jordan Jalving, Carl Laird, Ruth Misener, and Calvin Tsay for serving on the committee.
Congratulations to Francesco Ceccon, Joshua Haddad, Jordan Jalving, Carl D Laird, Ruth Misener, Alexander Thebelt, and Calvin Tsay for winning the 2022 COIN-OR Cup for their submission OMLT (https://github.com/cog-imperial/OMLT).
We didn’t *only* select OMLT because it makes us hungry for a yummy 🍳 omelet 🍳. OMLT represents neural networks and gradient-boosted trees in an algebraic modeling language (Pyomo) suitable for integrating into optimization formulations. Optimizing over trained surrogate models is important because it allows integration of NNs or GBTs into larger decision-making problems. Computer science applications include maximizing a neural acquisition function or verifying neural networks. In engineering applications, machine learning models may replace complicated constraints or serve as surrogates in larger design and operations problems. OMLT supports GBTs through an ONNX interface and NNs through both ONNX and Keras interfaces. OMLT transforms these pre-trained machine learning models into the algebraic modeling language Pyomo to encode the optimization formulations.
But also, the association with our tummies did help the winners, who we hope will make us breakfast.
TL;DR: Without financial support, we are struggling to maintain widely used COIN-OR projects, such as Cbc, Clp and Ipopt. Email sponsors@coin-or.org to become a foundation sponsor, or sponsor us on Github.
You can join the discussion on GitHub.
Longer TL;DR
The COIN-OR Foundation was founded in 2000 with the mission to create and disseminate knowledge related to all aspects of computational operations research. In many respects, COIN-OR has been a wildly successful initiative. COIN-OR projects, such as Cbc, Clp, Ipopt, and Pyomo, are now used by thousands of organizations around the world. Additionally, new projects have demonstrated great potential. Gravity, an algebraic modeling language written in C++, was used by the winning team of the recent ARPA-E Grid Optimization Competition, and the authors of Gravity were awarded the COIN-OR Cup for 2021.
Despite these successes, the strategic leadership board of the COIN-OR Foundation is re-assessing our mission and future direction. Two common threads have plagued the COIN-OR Foundation: access to funding and success at getting community members involved in important activities. Over the past few months, the board has discussed these problems, and we have come to the conclusion that without change, we see no path other than to slowly wind down some of the most impactful activities of COIN-OR. This means things such as releasing and distributing binaries, testing, documentation, responding to issues and questions. Without support, these activities will no longer be organized by the COIN-OR Foundation.
The rest of this (long) blog post describes why this is the case and how you can get involved to allow the COIN-OR Foundation to continue with these valuable activities.
A brief history1
COIN-OR was founded in 2000 to host a number of open-source projects from IBM. At the time, IBM provided hosting and infrastructure support, and contributed in-kind support in the form of developer hours. In 2004, the non-profit COIN-OR Foundation was established to provide independence from IBM, and the hosting infrastructure was migrated to servers at Clemson University. Now, all projects are hosted on GitHub, although some legacy infrastructure (the website, wiki and mailing lists) are still hosted on Clemson servers.
Why was COIN-OR founded?
It’s useful to remember that when the COIN-OR project was founded, the culture and tooling around open-source software in the optimization community was different. There was no Git, and there was no GitHub. Authors of optimization software often didn’t make source available and when they did, it was shared on personal websites in an ad hoc manner. Visibility of packages was dependent on word-of-mouth, or by attending conferences. There was also no quality control of software; it was user-beware.
COIN-OR set out to change the landscape through a few key initiatives:
Did we succeed in each of these four initiatives?
The first initiative is an unqualified yes. The COIN-OR brand is strong, and users recognize that COIN-OR provides a range of excellent open-source tools for operations research. According to independent benchmarks by Hans Mittelmann, Clp, Cbc, and Ipopt are the leading open-source solvers for linear programming, mixed-integer programming, and nonlinear programming respectively.
The suite of common infrastructure was also a great success. There are now 73 projects in COIN-OR, many of which would have died on the vine without the infrastructure provided by COIN-OR. Recently, we completed a move away from the hosting infrastructure provided by COIN-OR, with all projects now hosted on GitHub. This part of the common infrastructure met a critical need for the optimization community in the past, but that it is no longer needed. Even in the new world of Github, however, there is still a substantial need for maintenance of common infrastructure for build, test, release, and other related activities.
The success of initiatives related to review and publication of software has been mixed. At the least, we have raised awareness around issues of publication and sustainability and similar initiatives are now being undertaken by traditional publication venues.
The final initiative has been a failure. COIN-OR has never received any significant donations, and we have never been in a position to hire developers to work on COIN-OR projects. The lack of funds and available developers has meant that many projects are now effectively unmaintained; We’ve managed to keep them building, but they have not received any new features or updates in years.
Where are we now?
The key components of COIN-OR today are:
The Strategic Leadership Board meets every two weeks. We recently updated the COIN-OR bylaws, and have had on-going discussions about the future of COIN-OR that spurred this blog post.
Within the group of widely-used core solvers—Clp, Cbc, and Ipopt—development and maintenance has been undertaken by a small group of developers who have received little recognition, despite the immense value they have provided to the operations research community. These people represent a critical risk within the entire open-source operations research ecosystem. Without increasing the number of people that contribute to COIN-OR, or obtaining funding to pay for on-going maintenance and support, we expect that COIN-OR will be unable to maintain our existing projects.
Possible future directions
The board has discussed the following three options for the future of COIN-OR.
Option 1: Wind down the COIN-OR Foundation activities related to maintenance and development of common infrastructure and existing codes that are not otherwise maintained.
In this scenario:
Option 2: Continue operating in a haphazard fashion and hope that the community will eventually take up the cause as things slowly degrade.
In this scenario, we continue as we have for the last few years. The Foundation does not attempt any large projects due to funding and time constraints, issues accumulate unaddressed on Github and projects slowly undergo bit rot, eventually failing to build or work in a modern computational environment.
Option 3: Find a path to funding the current activities of the COIN-OR Foundation in a sustainable way.
In this scenario, we find financial resources to support professionals working on COIN-OR infrastructure and projects on behalf of the foundation. In addition, or as an alternative, we find members with the drive and enthusiasm to revive COIN-OR and expand it into new areas. Working in concert with the board, these members could:
If we had funding…
If we pursue Option 3, the board has set a goal of raising $200,000/year to hire one full time developer (or equivalent) to work on the core COIN-OR projects of Cbc, Clp, and Ipopt (and their dependencies). This development time would be used to:
The Board’s position
It is the position of the Board that Option 2 (status quo) is not viable. Therefore, we are left with the option of acquiring new members and expanding COIN-OR through funding, or winding down the COIN-OR foundation. We are writing this blog post as an attempt to pursue Option 3. However, if nothing in the next few months changes with regard to COIN-ORs funding situation, we will be left with Option 1.
Option 1 does not mean the end of COIN-OR projects; the code is still open-source and anyone will be able to continue to use it and distribute it, even in commercial products, in accordance with the license. Instead, it means a transition from COIN-OR as an entity with a presence at conferences, providing support, documentation, pre-compiled binaries, and the like to a COIN-OR that exists only as a collection of individuals working on projects living in the COIN-OR GitHub organization without an official governance structure. Even the Github organization itself would need to be managed by willing individuals with no guarantee of continuity.
How you can get involved
If you use COIN-OR software and you want to see continued support for COIN-OR, here’s how you can help avoid Option 1.
As an individual
Donate to COIN-OR. Donations send a strong signal that there is demand for our software.
As an individual, you can also contribute to our projects or join the discussion. Remember that contributing is not just writing code to fix bugs; you can improve the documentation, or triage and reply to open issues on GitHub.
If you are interested in helping the board expand the activities of COIN-OR, or have suggestions for how we might do so, please email info@coin-or.org.
As an organization
If you are part of an organization that uses COIN-OR software, please contact sponsors@coin-or.org discuss a support agreement or to make a tax-deductible donation. We are interested in exploring long-term relationships with commercial users of our software in order to provide on-going support and maintenance. We estimate that we need $200,000 per year on an on-going basis to avoid Option 1.
Finally, please share this with your friends and colleagues, and email info@coin-or.org with any feedback on the topics discussed in this blog post.
You can join the discussion on our future over at Github.
1 Also see a 20 year retrospective appearing in the ICS newsletter for a longer history of the COIN-OR Foundation