View source for Obtaining CONOPT for ASCEND

[[CONOPT]] is an advanced optimisation ([[NLP]]) solver available that is supported by ASCEND. CONOPT is commercial software, and as such can not be distributed with ASCEND's GPL-licensed code.

A paid license for CONOPT costs 640 USD for an academic single-user license, or 3200 USD for a non-academic license. These are the same prices as for the GAMS version of the CONOPT solver. To be elegible to use the academic license, CONOPT must used for teaching and/or non-commercial research, i.e. not for consulting. 

The ASCEND project receives a fixed percentage of the CONOPT license fee, so this is a good way to support our project as well.


'''Note''': CONOPT has been tested with ASCEND on Linux (Fedora 9, Ubuntu 9.04) as well as Windows (XP). It is likely to be OK on other platforms, but may need some testing.


== Trial copy ==

A two-month trial of CONOPT is available for users of ASCEND.

If you would like to obtain a trial copy of CONOPT please send us your details and whether you will be using it for academic or non-academic purposes. We will send you a suitable version of CONOPT (Linux RPM, Windows .EXE, or Linux .so file), and will also pass on your details to Arne Drud, who may wish to contact you to follow up on your experience with CONOPT.

Alternatively, you can obtain a trial copy yourself from the <tt>libconsub3.so</tt> file that is distributed with the [http://download.gams-software.com/ GAMS download]. Drop the file in <tt>/usr/lib</tt> and ASCEND should detect it. If you can't put it there, set the <tt>CONOPT_PATH</tt> environment variable to the correct directory before launching ASCEND. 


When CONOPT is correctly installed, it will appear in the 'Tools&rarr;Solver Engine' menu in the PyGTK GUI for ASCEND.

Arne Drud ([http://www.conopt.com]) has very generously permitted this two-month trial usage of CONOPT. We would ask that you respect his request that you only use the trial version for 2 months, after which time please remove it from your machine, or pay for a license.

See also [[CONOPT]].




 [[Category:Solvers]]