Acquisition and Development of a New Computing Environment for the Department of Economics

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With National Science Foundation support Drs. Hidehiko Ichimura, John Kagel and Jean-Francois Richard will acquire instrumentation to upgrade the antiquated computer facilities at the department of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. This award will permit both acquisition and development of the new, more efficient system. The department will acquire a state of the art multi-CPU server, will upgrade the graduate student PC laboratory and finally upgrade the department's experimental laboratory. To use the system more effectively, the group will develop a scheduling process. They will adopt and modify an off the shelf queuing system to schedule workloads in a way that batch jobs can be executed on idle machines even during times at which the laboratory is dedicated to data gathering. To accomplish this each computer must work in a uniform environment and the researchers will develop an integrated system to achieve this goal. They will make the result available in an effective drop-in package form which can be widely distributed. The upgraded laboratory will be immediately useful to pursue a variety of research goals. Three projects relate to major numerical developments whose importance transcend economics: high-dimensional numerical integration, nonparametric methods and simulation techniques. Another deals with the statistical analysis of dynamic nonlinear macroeconomic models. Three applied projects address fundamental current socio-economic policy issues: job training programs, health-care reforms and mortgage lending patterns. The laboratories will be extensively used by students and thus serve an important educational as well as research function.