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Update (October 2026): This update brings all solvers up to their latest versions and directly resolves a key concern regarding the MIPfeas benchmark: hardware discrepancies across runs. Moving forward, all solvers are evaluated on a single, standardized platform: the NVIDIA DGX Spark, equipped with an ARM CPU (10 Cortex-X925 performance cores and 10 Cortex-A725 efficiency cores) and a GB10 GPU. By pairing a strong modern CPU with a capable GPU, the Spark system represents accessible, commodity hardware that offers a fair compromise for both CPU- and GPU-accelerated algorithms. To ensure an equitable playing field across the performance cores, solver worker and thread counts are capped at 10. Additionally, we replaced the previous distribution and violin plots with a clearer visualization of the primal integral across solvers. This iteration was prepared specifically for the MIPfeas benchmark presentation during Hans Mittelmann’s session at the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meeting.

Introduction

In early 2024, the last steps in the integration of the McCarl GAMS User Guide with the GAMS documentation will be completed. The McCarl Guide will no longer be pointed to or available from the GAMS docs, although it is available on Bruce McCarl’s web site or the GAMSWORLD forum (see links below). While these last steps may go unnoticed by many GAMS users, the integration process has resulted in a much better documentation that all have benefited from. Reaching this milestone provides us a good opportunity to look back at the history of the McCarl Guide. In this article, we consider the original purpose of the Guide, the positive impact it has had during the many years of its use, and the reasons for its retirement.