DP12890 A Practical Guide to Parallelization in Economics

Author(s):	Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, David Zarruk Valencia
Publication Date:	April 2018
Keyword(s):	Computational Methods, Parallel Computing, Programming Languages
JEL(s):	C63, C68, E37
Programme Areas:	Monetary Economics and Fluctuations
Link to this Page:	cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=12890

This guide provides a practical introduction to parallel computing in economics. After a brief introduction to the basic ideas of parallelization, we show how to parallelize a prototypical application in economics using, on CPUs, Julia, Matlab, R, Python, C++ - OpenMP, Rcpp - OpenMP, and C++ - MPI, and, on GPUs, CUDA and OpenACC. We provide code that the user can download and fork, present comparative results, and explain the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. We conclude with some additional remarks about alternative approaches.