Using CVX on a cluster (academic license)

1

Hello,

Is it possible to set up CVX for use on a cluster using an academic license? I’m just setting this up for my own use, so “username” isn’t an issue, but there are over 3000 possible hostIDs on this particular cluster… which is considerably more than the 4 allowed under the academic license.

Thanks for your help,
Kyle

2

Nevermind – I anticipated licensing issues, but after giving it a go everything actually seems fine.

-Kyle

3

You only need CVX licenses to use the commercial solvers anyway… and actually, if you have a Gurobi academic license, you don’t even need that.

4

I am having this very problem at the moment (actually, not hypothetically). I would like to use Mosek with CVX Professional on an academic cluster, but cannot because every node of the cluster has a different host ID. Can you please advise?

5

We can’t offer cluster licenses to individual academic users.

6

In your licensing strategy, does CVX offer academic license for severs for the university? Thanks!

Here I have another problem. Our HPC have gurobi and its license installed, the corresponding license file (“gurobi.lic”) just contains the “TOKENSERVER” and “PORT”. It seems that CVX cannot understand sever-type Gurobi license file (it needs to retrieve the license from the given sever-name). Any comments?

I read your references listed on CVX and S.Boyd’s website. Your PhD thesis is excellent! I can use the strategy presented in your thesis to convert the problem to standard QCQP and then use Gurobi. However, most large computation is running on clusters. And CVX helps a lot to simplify modeling optimization problems. If CVX could offer server-level support, that would be excellent!

Thanks for any of your comments!

FYI, the message returned by cvx_setup.m:

Searching for solvers…5 shims found.

2 solvers initialized (* = default):

*SDPT3      4.0        {cvx}/sdpt3
 SeDuMi     1.34       {cvx}/sedumi

4 solvers skipped:

GLPK
    Could not find a GLPK installation.

Gurobi     6.00       {cvx}/gurobi/a64
    A CVX Professional license is required.

Gurobi_2   6.51       /opt/apps/resif/devel/v1.1-20150414/core/software/math/GurobiOptimizer/6.5.1
    A CVX Professional license is required.

Mosek      unknown    {cvx}/mosek/a64
    A CVX Professional license is required.
7

Thanks for this post. I also meet this problem. My simulation has high computational complexity so I generally use the HPC clusters inside the Institute. If I set up the correct path over my computer and submit the job to cluster, obviously it doesn’t work. Can anyone provide any suggestions on setting up path to the corresponding files or how to solve this problem? Many thanks.

8

I put a lot of effort into making individual academic licensing as automated as possible but that automation simply can’t be done for clusters. I’m afraid cluster licensing is simply not something we can readily support. I’ve worked to make the process simpler for me, but let me be frank: there is no money in it for me, and thus my paying work has to take priority.

I’m investigating a way to make this possible without my direct intervention every time, but until that happens, nobody should count on being able to use CVX Professional licenses on clusters. The free solvers will have to suffice.

9

I have the same problem: I can’t install a CVX professional license on the cluster, so I can’t use Mosek that comes with CVX. CVX can’t read a cluster Gurobi license even thought Gurobi has been installed at our university site. So I can’t use Gurobi.

Today I read in the forum that if I install Mosek independently and make it work within matlab, then I can just install a regular CVX package and it should detect Mosek and I should be able to use it. Would this be a work around to get CVX working on a cluster? Has anyone tried this?

Many thanks,

Yijun

10

Just an update, I tried this and it didn’t work. It still requires a professional CVX license to make the mosek work.

-Yijun