Maximum Likelihood Estimation Using Parallel Computing: An Introduction to MPI

The computational difficulty of econometric problems has increased dramatically in recent years as econometricians examine more complicated models and utilize more sophisticated estimation techniques. Many problems in econometrics are `embarrassingly parallel' and can take advantage of parallel computing to reduce the wall clock time it takes to solve a problem. In this paper I demonstrate a method that can be used to solve a maximum likelihood problem using the MPI message passing library. The econometric problem is a simple multinomial logit model that does not require parallel computing but illustrates many of the problems one would confront when estimating more complicated models