Multi-core CPUs, Clusters and Grid Computing: a Tutorial

The nature of computing is changing and it poses both challenges and opportunities for economists. Instead of increasing clock speed, future microprocessors will have "multi-cores" with separate execution units. "Threads" or other multi-processing techniques that are rarely used today are required to take full advantage of them. Beyond one machine, it has become easy to harness multiple computers to work in clusters. Besides dedicated clusters, they can be made up of unused lab computers or even your colleagues' machines. We will give live demos of multi-core and clusters and will describe grid computing (multiple clusters that could span the Internet). OpenMP (open multi-processing) and MPI (message passing interface) are among the topics described and shown live