Acceleration of Coarse Grain Molecular Dynamics on GPU Architectures

Coarse grain (CG) molecular models have been proposed to simulate complex sys- tems with lower computational overheads and longer timescales with respect to atom- istic level models. However, their acceleration on parallel architectures such as Graphic Processing Units (GPU) presents original challenges that must be carefully evaluated. The objective of this work is to characterize the impact of CG model features on parallel simulation performance. To achieve this, we implemented a GPU-accelerated version of a CG molecular dynamics simulator, to which we applied specic optimizations for CG models, such as dedicated data structures to handle dierent bead type interac- tions, obtaining a maximum speed-up of 14 on the NVIDIA GTX480 GPU with Fermi architecture. We provide a complete characterization and evaluation of algorithmic and simulated system features of CG models impacting the achievable speed-up and accuracy of results, using three dierent GPU architectures as case studie

The last fifteen years of stagnation in Italy: A Business Cycle Accounting Perspective

In this paper, we investigate possible sources of declining economic growth performance in Italy starting around the middle of the ’90s. A long-run data analysis suggests that the poor performance of the Italian economy cannot be ascribed to an unfortunate business cycle contingency. The rest of the euro area countries have shown better performance, and the macroeconomic data show that the Italian economy has not grown as rapidly as these other European economies. We investigate the sources of economic fluctuations in Italy by applying the Business Cycle Accounting procedure introduced by Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007). We analyze the relative importance of efficiency, labor, investment and government wedges for business cycles in Italy over the 1982-2008 period. We find that different wedges have played different roles during the period, but the efficiency wedge is revealed to be the main factor responsible for the stagnation phase beginning around 1995. Our findings also show that the improvement in labor market distortions that occurred in Italy during the ’90s provided an alleviating effect, preventing an even stronger slowdown in per capita output growth.

Policy Advice: Markets and Policies

This paper aims at the provision of applicable recommendations for institutions and actors involved regarding the EMU accession process both in CEE and in the eurozone. In order to provide topical advice, the first part, on markets, will concentrate on theory and empirics of labour markets, financial markets and foreign direct investment, whereas the second part, dealing with policies, will put emphasis on exchange rates, FDI, labour markets, and the social dimension. It turns out that benefits and losses of EMU accession may differ with regard to the different issue areas. To get to clear-cut recommendations, diverging impacts and their balance have been taken into consideration. Special regard has been given to divergent groups of winners and losers during accession, its impact on the political decisionmaking process, and ways to compensate for them.

Modelling Inflation in EU Accession Countries: The Case of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland

Inflation in Central and East European countries varied considerably over the transition phase, and econometric relationships between prices, money, wages and exchange rates are said to have been unstable during this period. In order to shed some light on the issue, this paper analyses some empirical models of the inflation process in the three earliest east European transition economies: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Since the end of the 1980s these economies have experienced high rates of inflation, although significant disinflation measures were introduced during the mid-nineties to enhance these countries’ chances of joining the EU, and they succeeded in getting inflation under control without high costs in terms of lost output. Given this, the determinants of inflation need to be empirically analysed not only in order to understand the disinflation measures, but also to assess the possible effects of future pressure on prices. Price stabilisation is an essential complement to the success of transition. Policies to contain inflation are necessary for transition economies to grow and firms to restructure. In the present paper, we first look at inflation within the context of multivariate cointegration, where domestic and foreign price determinants are initially assessed in separate blocks (each single-theory based) in order to obtain a number of long-term attractors. We then formulate consumer and producer inflation equations from more general VEqCMs for each country. The importance of theory-based imbalances (from previous cointegration experiments) in explaining inflation can be assessed at this stage. Our most significant empirical findings seem to substantiate the idea that many, if not all, theoretical determinants of inflation are of importance in those countries in question: the exchange rate and the output gap would appear to be of particular importance in explaining the phenomenon.Inflation modelling, transition economies, European Union enlargement