Frontline Systems, developer of the Solver in Microsoft Excel, is shipping new Mac OS X and Excel 2011 compatible versions of Premium Solver Platform and five plug-in, large-scale Solver Engine.

They're "designed to bring unmatched ease, speed, and power to solving challenging mathematical optimization problems with up to millions of decision variables," says Daniel Fylstra, president of Frontline Systems. The new products are released as Version 10.5, in line with their counterparts on Windows.

Premium Solver Platform 10.0 for Mac is upward compatible from the new Solver for Excel 2011, and all previous versions of Solver for Mac and Windows. Its LP/Quadratic Solver handles linear programming problems up to 40 times larger than the standard Solver, and problems of virtually unlimited size -- millions of decision variables -- with plug-in large-scale Solver Engines, says Fylstra. While speed is highly problem-dependent, it usually solves linear mixed-integer problems 10 to 100 times faster than the standard Solver, and quadratic programming problems up to 10 times larger at high speed, he adds.

Free trial versions are available for download from http://www.solver.com/macsolver . Contact Frontline for pricing options.