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NEOS reaches two million submission milestone

NEOS, the Network-Enabled Optimisation System, developed by researchers at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in conjunction with Northwestern University, has reached a new milestone: two million submissions to its optimisation software.

NEOS has been used extensively for a variety of applications, including modelling electricity markets, predicting global protein folding and training artificial neural networks.

Optimisation technology is essential to engineers, scientists, businesses and students. But solving optimisation problems can be tedious and time-consuming. Key to the success of NEOS is its removal of obstacles that prevent the rapid solution of complex optimisation problems.

Using flexible combinations of web tools, remote procedure calls and email, researchers can access the NEOS server and have their optimisation problems solved automatically, without installing software, downloading and linking code, or writing driver subroutines. Users of NEOS can obtain a solution in a matter of hours instead of days.

'Because of its ease of use and generality, NEOS has gained tremendous popularity,' said Jorge Moré, an Argonne Distinguished Fellow who has guided the development of NEOS since its inception a decade ago. In 1999, there were fewer than 18,000 submissions to NEOS. Today NEOS is the premier source of optimisation technology on the web for users of optimisation software.

The two million milestone also reflects the growing use of the NEOS server by students and faculty in both undergraduate and graduate classes.

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