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This repo contains the official CUTEst set of optimization test problems expressed in Standard Input Format (SIF). Each example is contained in a file with the extension .SIF (but N.B., below). The leading comments describe briefly the source of the example, with citations if relevant, and contains a classification string that conforms to rules described in

https://ralna.github.io/SIFDecode/html/classification/

For a formal definition of SIF, see

https://ralna.github.io/SIFDecode/html/sif/

In addition, for convenience, there are subdirectories that provide symbolic links to all the CUTEst examples in commonly-occurring subsets. These are

lpsif Linear Programming examples qpsif Quadratic Programming examples bqpsif Bound-constrained Quadratic Programming examples nlssif Nonlinear least-squares examples nlesif Nonlinear equation and inequality examples uncsif Unconstrained examples bcsif Bound-Constrained examples gosif Global Optimization examples lcsif Linearly-constrained nonlinear programming examples nlpsif Nonlinear Programming examples

Each directory contains a file *.dat listing the examples in alphabetical order.

Currently, the problems encoded as

BA-L16LS.SIF, BA-L52LS.SIF, LRCOVTYPE.SIF, MNISTS0.SIF, MNISTS5.SIF BA-L16.SIF, BA-L52.SIF, MNISTS0LS.SIF and MNISTS5LS.SIF

exceed the permitted Github filesize limit, and we provide them instead as compressed (bzip2) files. Once they have been downloaded, they may be restored using (in Unix-like systems) the commands

bunzip2 -k BA-L16LS.SIF.bz2

etc; the -k flag may be ommited if a copy of the original (compressed) file is not required.

Further subsets may be found using the SIFDecode select tool from

https://github.com/ralna/SIFDecode/wiki

Nick Gould, for GALAHAD productions 31st May, 2026