Gretl working paper series
by Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
* WITH THE OBVIOUS APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING *
After having talked about this for a while in several occasions, finally
we inaugurated the Gretl Working Paper Series, which is hosted at the
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali here in Ancona (thanks for
that) and given proper circulation through the RePEc circuit (IDEAS,
EconPapers, etcetera).
Gretl WP #1, by Claudia Pigini and myself, can be found here:
https://ideas.repec.org/p/anc/wgretl/1.html
Of course, we welcome submissions by anybody. So, I think a few words of
what we have in mind will be useful: the gretl working paper series is
part of the overall gretl project.
As such, its aim is to host:
* "geeky" wps: papers devoted to the analysis of computational
techniques which may be used, at least in part, in the gretl code
for accuracy and/or performance (possible examples: what MPI is and
how to use it in hansl, quadrature techniques, optimisation
methods);
* "development" wps: papers which explore recent developments in
econometrics and implement them in gretl, or at least discuss
possible ways to do so (example: documentation to a particularly
complex function package);
* "practitioners" wps: survey/tutorial papers on some reasonably
advanced and general topic, which discuss how certain techniques can
be implemented in gretl (example: how to do policy evaluation in
Gretl: ATE, ATET, PS matching, RDD and all that; or state-of-the-art
trend-cycle decomposition; or the bootstrap; and so on);
* "empirical" wps: research papers in which you use gretl for some
non-trivial empirical modelling (no OLS, please); or possibly, hefty
Monte Carlo experiments.
* "teacher's corner" wps: comprehensive analysis of certain topics
with a view to their adoption as medium-to-advanced teaching
material in courses which use gretl as the reference software
package (example: something like Lee Adkins' book --- perhaps more
limited in scope: ARMAs, unit roots, panel estimators; but again:
please, no OLS).
If you're interested, please submit your working papers to me
(r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it); at least for the moment, we won't have a
formal peer-review procedure, but we may introduce one in the future
if necessary.
I have a LaTeX style file I can send to you for preparing the final
version after acceptance.
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------
9 years, 7 months
imaxc/imaxr
by Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Folks, consider this:
<hansl>
x = imaxr({1,2,1,2,1,2})
</hansl>
At present, this returns the scalar 2, but I wonder if it shouldn't
instead return a row vector holding {2,4,6}. But then, generalisation to
the case when the argument to imaxr is a matrix with more than 1 row
becomes awkward. Thoughts?
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------
9 years, 8 months
gretl AVX issue
by Allin Cottrell
Dear Dirk and Johannes,
I'm appealing to you as the packagers who have shown the greatest
interest in gretl over the years. I think you both know about the
"gretl AVX" issue, but then I'm sure you have lots of things to think
about so let me briefly restate it, as a lead-up to asking your
opinion.
Since version 1.9.14 of November 2013, gretl's configure script has by
default checked the build host for support for the SSE2 and AVX
instruction sets, and has enabled these instructions if they're
supported. However, there are configure switches available to disable
each:
--disable-sse2
--disable-avx
The current default is fine for individuals building gretl for their
own use, but not necessarily fine for packagers. SSE2 is not much of a
issue, I think -- it has been in Intel CPUs since 2001 and AMD CPUs
since 2003. AVX, on the other hand, can be a problem. It has been in
new Intel CPUs since Q1 of 2011 and AMD CPUs since Q3 of 2011, so
there are still plenty of PCs out there that don't support AVX.
So here's the key point: If you build gretl on an AVX host without
using the --disable-avx flag with configure, you'll get a binary that
will not run on a non-AVX machine (it will crash with "Illegal
instruction" on start-up). And we're seeing this happen in userland.
How do you think we should handle this? Do you reckon we should revise
our configure script to enable AVX only if it's explicitly requested?
Or is it enough if packagers are aware on the issue?
One more question: since we're getting nasty reports from people with
non-AVX machines on both Debian-derived distros and Fedora, we need to
do something about it soon. How would you feel about making available
new non-AVX builds of recent gretl? (It seems that packagers
sometimes put out a second build of given sources, though I don't know
the usual criteria for doing that.)
Allin
9 years, 8 months
version plans
by Allin Cottrell
Gretl 1.10.0 has just been released. Usually when that happens I
then bump the gretl CVS version number up one least significant
digit. This time, however, CVS is going to 1.10.90cvs.
This reflects the fact that we're now shooting for 2.0 -- something
that Sven has been (quite rightly) urging for a while. There won't
be much if any truly new functionality in gretl 2.0 relative to
1.10: our main aim is increased polish, meaning fixing bugs and
filling gaps in the documentation. (But it wouldn't be gretl if we
didn't smuggle in some enhanced functionality!)
So in the run up to this year's gretl conference in Berlin (see
http://www.gretlconference.org/ if you've missed earlier
announcements) we'll be specially grateful to receive bug reports.
Please help to make gretl 2.0 as bug-free as humanly possible!
Allin
9 years, 8 months