Principal Investigator:
Professor P Rees and Dr A Evans
Dates:
1st March 2003 – 28th February 2005
Grant:
ESRC
Summary:
The bid is for a social science Beowulf-cluster parallel supercomputer for geographical analysis and the modelling of populations. The equipment will contribute to three projects, considerably enhancing their outputs.
- The forecasting of the UK’s population with the Government Actuary’s Department. The work will improve the government’s population estimates by recalculating them with a probabilistic treatment. This will enable them to better constrain socio-economic forecasts and policy models.
- The modelling if urban development. We are currently modelling the growth of UK and South East Asian cities using Intelligent Agents. These models are optimally run on such parallel computers allowing extra detail to be added. The outputs will provide information for the planning of sustainable city growth.
- Spatial Analysis. Current research in areas like cluster hunting (e.g. cancer) and boundary production (e.g. constituencies) is limited by processing power. The equipment will allow us to jump out of these constrictions.
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