The underlying improvements in optimization in SAS/OR 12.1 are chiefly related to multithreading, which denotes the use of multiple computational cores to enable computations to be executed in parallel rather than serially. Multithreading can provide dramatic performance improvements for optimization because these underlying computations are performed many times in the course of an optimization process.

The underlying linear algebra operations for the linear, quadratic, and nonlinear interior point optimization algorithms are now multithreaded. The LP, QP, and NLP solvers can be used by PROC OPTMODEL, PROC OPTLP, and PROC OPTQP in SAS/OR. For nonlinear optimization with PROC OPTMODEL, the evaluation of nonlinear functions is multithreaded for improved performance.

Finally, the process of creating an optimization model from PROC OPTMODEL statements has been multithreaded. PROC OPTMODEL contains powerful declarative and programming statements and is adept at enabling data-driven definition of optimization models, with the result that a rather small section of PROC OPTMODEL code can create a very large optimization model when it is executed. Multithreading can dramatically shorten the time that is needed to create an optimization model.

In SAS/OR 12.1 you can use the NTHREADS= option in the PERFORMANCE statement in PROC OPTMODEL and other SAS/OR optimization procedures to specify the number of cores to be used. Otherwise, SAS detects the number of cores available and uses them.