Parallel computing has gained considerable notoriety in the high
performance computing arena. One form of lowly parallel computing,
specifically that of cluster computing, has emerged as popular due in
part to the technological advances in personal computer hardware over
the past two decades. In addition to this heightened performance, the
cost of these machines have decreased, making clusters an economically
advantageous replacement for the traditional supercomputer. Finally, the
introduction of widely available parallel tools (such as the Message
Passing Interface or Parallel Virtual Machine) insured that the
architecture required little in the way of development and programming
cost for usage.
Vanessa Beddo's research involves the parallel implementation (and evaluation) of
various statistical algorithms, ranging from the elementary calculation
of descriptive statistics to more advanced procedures. Code will soon be
made available online (as this page is currently under construction),
but you will also have contact me so that I may mail you the
instructions as well as the program you desire. All procedures have been
written in C and MPI. They have been developed on the departmental
cluster www.stat.ucla.edu/cluster.
You may reach Vanessa via email at VBeddo@stat.ucla.edu
with any requests or inquiries.
Analysis of California Adolescent Tobacco Data
This is an analysis of the California Healthy Kids Survey, focusing on
the tobacco usage of adolescents. Data has been collected from
California high school students during years 1998 through 2001,
resulting in 607,007 surveys. Each survey may contain up to seven
components, producing up to 300 variables of interest. Due to the size
of this dataset, widely used statistical programs fail to complete many
of the required analyses. Parallel programming is employed for data
manipulation, imputation and analysis. Implementation and development of
these programs take place on the departmental cluster
www.stat.ucla.edu/cluster.
Ongoing research in the Division Cancer Prevention and Control Research
of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA. Investigators:
Vanessa Beddo and Coen Bernaards.