English

Distributed Parallel Structure-Aware Presolving for Arrowhead Linear Programs

Optimization and Control 2026-03-05 v1

Abstract

We present a structure-aware parallel presolve framework specialized to arrowhead linear programs (AHLPs) and designed for high-performance computing (HPC) environments, integrated into the parallel interior point solver PIPS-IPM++. Large-scale LPs arising from automated model generation frequently contain redundancies and numerical pathologies that necessitate effective presolve, yet existing presolve techniques are primarily serial or structure-agnostic and can become time-consuming in parallel solution workflows. Within PIPS-IPM++, AHLPs are stored in distributed memory, and our presolve builds on this to apply a highly parallel, distributed presolve across compute nodes while keeping communication overhead low and preserving the underlying arrowhead structure. We demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of our approach on a diverse set of AHLPs and compare it against state-of-the-art presolve implementations, including PaPILO and the presolve implemented within Gurobi. Even on a single machine, our presolve significantly outperforms PaPILO by a factor of 18 and Gurobi's presolve by a factor of 6 in terms of shifted geometric mean runtime, while reducing the problems by a similar amount to PaPILO. Using a distributed compute environment, we outperform Gurobi's presolve by a factor of 13.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.03498,
  title  = {Distributed Parallel Structure-Aware Presolving for Arrowhead Linear Programs},
  author = {Nils-Christian Kempke and Stephen J Maher and Daniel Rehfeldt and Ambros Gleixner and Thorsten Koch and Svenja Uslu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.03498},
  year   = {2026}
}