The use of powerful workstations in statistical analysis and model building

Abstract

The Central Bureau of Statistics, Norway, CBS, is highly dependent upon computers for both production of statistics and economic research and analysis. Motivated by shortcomings of mainframes and PCs in this work, CBS has introduced and tested out Unix based workstations in economic research and analysis.

For computational intensive tasks such as parameter estimation and simulation workstations proved quite superior to PCs: CPU time is shorter and available memory is larger. A comparison with mainframes gives a less unambiguous conclusion. Due to quick input/output rate on the mainframe, the CPU time required on workstation sometimes exceeds that of a mainframe. However, because of the time sharing system of a mainframe, elapsed time on a mainframe may still be longer than on a workstation.

Communication problems of introducing workstations into the existing computer park has been solved satisfyingly. Data transmission is performed smoothly. When using PCs as terminals to workstations one faces minor shortcomings, which future network innovation hopefully will remove.

CBS intends to enlargen the workstation stock in the near future. Most macroeconomic models use the fourth generation language Troll, which so far has been available only on mainframe. When a workstation version is released in 1992, CBS plans to convert most macroeconomic models to workstation.