As economic models become more complex and reflect more of the heterogeneity among households and firms in the economies that we try to explain, the computational burden of solving these models increases exponentially. In the profession, this is called the curse of dimensionality.
In response to the increasing computation times required by the complexity of many current economic models, cluster computing and parallel processing are becoming important skills for economists. A new resource for economists in this area has just been made available to the public thanks to a National Science Foundation funded joint project of Russell Cooper (Univ. of Texas at Austin), Kim Ruhl (NYU Stern), and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The website is www.clustereconomics.org.
In response to the increasing computation times required by the complexity of many current economic models, cluster computing and parallel processing are becoming important skills for economists. A new resource for economists in this area has just been made available to the public thanks to a National Science Foundation funded joint project of Russell Cooper (Univ. of Texas at Austin), Kim Ruhl (NYU Stern), and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The website is www.clustereconomics.org.
Clustereconomics.com is meant to be a repository of introductory expositions of computational solution methods and applications as well as computer code for implementing the procedures on a cluster. The information on this page is expected to grow as the project gains momentum. I think that these advances in computational economics are a indicative of an important direction in which the profession is moving. Check out the site if you get a chance.
