oBB 0.5b (beta)

Parallel global optimization of Hessian Lipschitz continuous functions.

Documentation

HTML documentation is available at http://packages.python.org/oBB

Requirements

oBB requires the following software to be installed:

• Python 2.6 to 2.7 (http://www.python.org/)
• A working implementation of MPI-2 (e.g. OpenMPI, http://www.open-mpi.org/)

Additionally, the following python packages should be installed (these will be installed automatically if using pip, see Installation using pip):

• NumPy 1.3.0 or higher (http://www.numpy.org/)
• MPI for Python 1.3 or higher (http://mpi4py.scipy.org/)
• CVXOPT 1.1.3 or higher (http://cvxopt.org/)

Optionally, matplotlib 1.1.0 or higher (http://www.matplotlib.org/) may be manually installed for visualising the algorithm in 2D.

Installation using pip

For easy installation, use pip (http://www.pip-installer.org/):

$ [sudo] pip install obb

or alternatively easy_install:

$ [sudo] easy_install obb

If you do not have root privileges or you want to install oBB for your private use, you can use:

$ pip install --user obb

which will install oBB in your home directory.

Manual installation

Alternatively, you can download the source code and unpack as follows:

$ wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/o/oBB/oBB-X.X.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf oBB-X.X.tar.gz
$ cd oBB-X.X

and then build and install manually using:

$ python setup.py build
$ [sudo] python setup.py install

If you do not have root privileges or you want to install oBB for your private use, you can use:

$ python setup.py install --user

instead.

Testing

oBB includes a command line test script to check that the installation was successfull. To run the test simply type the following into your shell:

$ test_obb

This will run oBB using MPI on one processor for a simple 2D sum of sins problem.

Note that if using the MPICH implementation of MPI we first need to start an mpd daemon in the background:

$ mpd &

but this is not necessary for other MPI implementations, e.g. OpenMPI.

Uninstallation

If oBB was installed using pip you can uninstall as follows:

$ [sudo] pip uninstall obb

If oBB was installed manually you have to remove the installed files by hand (located in your python site-packages directory).