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Some New Grid Enabled Tools for Quantitative e-Social Science

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Crouchley, Robert; Grose, Dan; Pritchard, John; Stott, Dave (Lancaster University)

Tools for computationally demanding social research are becoming available as part of commercial systems, e.g. SAS grid computing and Stata MP. However, these systems can be of limited use on a public grid, e.g. Stata MP can't access multiple data sets and neither system provides access to their source code. Furthermore, there are no plans to install them on the UK National Grid Service (NGS) because of cost/licensing issues.

We use R as the framework to enable statistical modelling on the grid because:

  • R is an effective, efficient and easy to use tool for Statistical Modelling
  • Many existing tried and tested statistical methods already available for R and can easily be modified to exploit the benefits of grid computing
  • Work flows to support the modelling process are simple to create
  • R is easy to install on most popular operating systems (Windows, Unix, OSX) and can be used directly from a USB memory stick
  • R includes a programming environment, which when used in conjunction with our multiR package, automatically provides a data centric scripting tool for grid computing
  • There are no licensing issues

We use 2 examples to illustrate how easy it has become to perform computationally demanding analyses using our grid enabled quantitative methods from R on a Windows XP PC.

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