Binary Packages

This section describes what is in the IDAES binary distribution, where it is installed, how to use it, and alternative installation methods. The IDAES binary distribution contains mainly third-party solvers compiled for user convenience and function libraries used for some IDAES physical property packages.

Installation is generally done through the idaes get-extensions command.

What is Included

The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has obtained a distribution license for HSL linear solvers that allows inclusion in IDAES’s compiled version of Ipopt.

All technical papers, sales and publicity material resulting from use of the HSL codes within IPOPT must contain the following acknowledgement: HSL, a collection of Fortran codes for large-scale scientific computation. See http://www.hsl.rl.ac.uk.

Main Package

• ipopt with HSL linear solvers.

• ipopt_sens, sIpopt solver with HSL linear solvers.

• ipopt_l1, Ipopt with a modified restoration phase algorithm with HSL linear solvers.

• shared ipopt library intended for cyipopt with HSL linear solvers.

• dot_sens

• k_aug

• pynumero

• clp

• cbc

• bonmin, (uses Ipopt with HSL)

• couenne (uses Ipopt with HSL)

• iapws95_external, function for the IAPWS95 EoS water

• swco2_external, functions for the Span-Wagner EoS for CO2

• cubic_roots, function for finding root of a cubic equation

• functions, miscellaneous simple math functions, examples, and test code

Extras

• petsc, AMPL solver library interface wrapper for PETSc’s SNES and TS solvers

Install Location

The location of the binary file installation is not currently configurable and it can be found with the command line command idaes bin-directory.

Manual Installation

The install location is not configurable, but the installation step can easily be done manually. This is occasionally necessary when, for example, a firewall blocks downloading the binary file from GitHub.

The first step for a manual install is to determine the location of the IDAES binary directory, which can be done with the command idaes bin-directory.

Download the IDAES binary release files from the binary releases page. You will need idaes-lib-{platform}.tar.gz, idaes-solvers-{platform}.tar.gz, and idaes-{optional package}-{platform}.tar.gz. Extract the tar files in the IDAES binary directory.

Using Solvers Without IDAES

Generally, the environment variables are set up to use the IDAES solvers when any idaes module is imported in Python. If you would like to use the solvers in Pyomo without importing IDAES, you will need to add the install location to your executable and dynamic library search path environment variables as appropriate for your operating system (e.g. add the install location to $PATH in Linux).

If you would like to use the IDAES binary distribution with Pyomo and have IDAES installed the simplest way to set the appropriate paths is just to import idaes.

Using the WSL

The Linux binary builds can be run on Windows using the WSL. This is useful when solvers depend on POSIX standards. Currently the optional PETSc solver is the only one which does not run on Windows.

In the WSL environment, download and extract the desired Linux release containing the solver you would like to run. In the Windows IDAES binary directory, create a batch file with the format {solver}_wsl.bat for example for PETSc petsc_wsl.bat.

Assuming you have put the binary file in the $HOME/loacl/bin and your WSL user name is john, and the distribution installed is Ubuntu-20.04 the contents of the batch file to run the petsc are below:

@echo off
idaes solver-wsl --distribution Ubuntu-20.04 --user john --executable ~/local/bin/petsc %*