Sorry for the off-topic (non-R) post. Has anyone seen/tried this (from this week's NA-digest)? Andy ------------------------------------------------------- From: Joel Malard <JM.Malard at pnl.gov> Date: Sat, 01 May 2004 15:31:15 -0700 Subject: ACRE, Parallel Covariance Component Estimation Code A couple of people have asked recently for a copy of the parallel (restricted/residual) maximum (REML/ML) gradient algorithms from the paper: J.M. Malard, "Parallel Restricted Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Linear models with a Dense Exogenous Matrix", Parallel Computing, 28, pp343-53, 2002. The code has been upgraded to PETSc 2.2.0 and TAO 1.6 and is available by sending an email at acre-developers at eml.pnl.gov. This software solves covariance component estimation problems for linear models were the residual vector comes from a normal distribution. The Cholesky factorization of the covariance matrix is a sparse matrix. The problem must be framed in the following form, which underlines that REML and ML estimation can be viewed as a next step in complexity after solving linear least squares. Given a dense matrix A and a response vector b, find the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator x and an upper triangular matrix L such that Ax=b+e and the matrix LL' (L times the transpose of L) is equal to the expected value of xx'. Both L and A are assumed full rank. It is customary in statistical modeling to split the matrix A into fixed and random effects. The two formulations are equivalent but no script is provided to do the conversion. The purpose of this project was to demonstrate that linear estimation algorithms such as REML can scale to a few hundred processors on a distributed memory platform. The dll webpage http://csm.pnl.gov/statistics/dll contains some additional information. If anyone needs an implementation of the REML Hessian matrix using the forward differentiation mode, it has existed in the past, send an email to the above address. My current priority is to allow for a singular matrix L. Comments, bugs reports and suggestions are welcome at the same email address. With best regards, Joel M. Malard, Ph.D. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Battelle Boulevard, PO Box 999 Mail Stop K1-85 Richland, WA 99352 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments,...{{dropped}}