% Abstract for TAO Users Manual

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\section*{Preface}

The Toolkit for Advanced Optimization (TAO) focuses on the development
of algorithms and software for the solution of large-scale optimization 
problems on high-performance architectures.  Areas of interest include 
unconstrained and bound-constrained optimization, nonlinear least squares 
problems, optimization problems with partial differential equation 
constraints, and variational inequalities and complementarity 
constraints.

The development of TAO was motivated by the scattered support for
parallel computations and the lack of reuse of external toolkits in
current optimization software.  Our aim is to produce high-quality 
optimization software for computing environments ranging from 
workstations and laptops to massively parallel high-performance 
architectures.  Our design decisions are strongly motivated by 
the challenges inherent in the use of large-scale distributed 
memory architectures and the reality of working with large, 
often poorly structured legacy codes for specific 
applications.

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