Documentation

Distributed Workers and the Distributed Manager

Running distributed algorithms requires several machines. One acts as the manager, coordinating the activities of the set of machines, and the others act as workers, receiving tasks from the manager. The manager typically acts as a worker itself, although not always. More machines generally produce better performance, although the marginal benefit of an additional machine typically falls off as you add more.

As we mentioned earlier, Distributed Workers do not require Gurobi licenses. You can add any machine to a Remote Services cluster to act as a Distributed Worker. The manager does require a distributed algorithm license (you'll see a DISTRIBUTED= line in your license file if distributed algorithms are enabled).

A typical distributed optimization will look like the following, with all machines belonging to the same Remote Services cluster:

The workload associated with managing distributed algorithms is quite light, so a machine can handle both the manager and worker roles without degrading performance.

Another option is to use a machine outside of your Remote Services cluster as the manager:

Note that we only allow a machine to act as manager for a single distributed job. If you want to run multiple distributed jobs simultaneously, you'll need multiple manager machines.