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This SIG is concerned with the application of computing to statistics, particularly the use of high performance and grid/cloud approaches in statistics. There are also issues in the use of computer models in wider science where statistical approaches are, sometimes unwittingly, used often embedded deeply within the codes.
The motivation is:
Therefore we need to ensure that statistical computing has the tools or your PC will run no faster in 10 years than it does today on single process applications.
Put it another way – 10 years ago we bought commodity PCs with 200MHz chips and 500MB hard drives. Today we buy commodity PCs with 3GHz chips and 500GB hard drives. In BogoMIPS terms, we have gone from a few hundred to 5000 instructions per second – about 20 times – while disks have increased by 1000 times. Say no more.
In 10 years time we may predict that your PC will have 100s of TB drives and 32 or 64 core chips with much the same clock speed as we have today. Todays HPC will be tomorrows desktop. We need to ensure that the software will work optimally.
In the UK we are looking to set up a Collaborative Computational Project. Interested people can look at the talks given at a meeting in Manchester on 24th July 2008 where some of these issues were addressed. We also spoke at a lunchtime meeting at the recent RSS Conference in Nottingham but that meeting was not very well attended.
We are keen to include international participation and while the issue is wider than industrial statistics – indeed wider than statistics itself – ENBIS is a suitable platform for working with pan-European industry.
The current SIG leader is John Logsdon but as he cannot be in Athens, a meeting this year cannot be scheduled unless someone is able to chair it. Email me if you are able to do this (j.logsdon at quantex-research.com)
We hope to have more to report by the Stockholm conference and will keep members posted.