Acquisition of Beowulf Cluster for Economic Research

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With support from a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Award, a group of researchers in the Economics Department at the University of Texas at Austin will acquire a cluster of compute nodes. This cluster will allow the research group to use parallel processing techniques in their quantitative study of a number of economic problems. The applications summarized in the proposal focus on a number of interesting economic questions in the areas of international trade, international finance, econometrics and macroeconomics. These applications are linked by the use of common computational techniques.Many of the applications rely on the solution of relatively complex dynamic optimization problems. These optimization problems are structured to provide insights into economic questions with both positive (understanding what we observe) and policy relevance. This grant allows us to overcome the computational constraint: the complexity of the problems makes them prohibitively expensive to solve using conventional computational tools. The proposed research will have three broad impacts. First, the work will directly advance our ability to evaluate the impact of various policies on the economy, both at the micro-level and atthe aggregate level. Second, we will make our advances in programming available to other users. This will be through the development of a web page for the UT Economics cluster to disseminate programs as well as research results through an electronic working paper series. Thus knowledge gained from this experience will not only further our individual research projects but will benefits PhD students, visiting scholars and other researchers through this interaction.Third, we will actively train researchers in use of the cluster for computational purposes. As outlined in the proposal, at UT we have an active computational field and PhD students in theseclasses will have access to the cluster for appropriate projects. Further, we have an active visiting researchers program and access to the cluster, along with training, will be made part of apackage for visiting scholars.