Case Study: Ministry of Finance accelerates economic modeling with Maplesoft and GAUSS Symbolic Tools

Ministry of Finance cuts GAUSS optimization runtimes 10-15 fold with Maplesoft

The Ministry of Finance faced a significant challenge in predicting national GDP, a process that required an army of economists to run complex optimization models for days on a supercomputer using the GAUSS software. Every change in data or assumptions necessitated a full re-computation, making the process extremely time-consuming and limiting the ability to run multiple scenarios. Maplesoft's technology, specifically the OpenMaple API from Maple 9, was identified as a key component in a new solution to address this bottleneck.

The solution was implemented by Econotron Software using Maplesoft's OpenMaple to create Symbolic Tools, an application that links Maple's symbolic power with GAUSS's numerical strength. This integration allowed GAUSS to obtain exact, pre-computed derivative formulas from Maple instead of using slow numerical approximations, a process known as automatic differentiation. The result was a 10 to 15-fold reduction in the running time of the optimization routines, turning a process that took days into one that takes hours and enabling more sophisticated economic modeling.

Ministry of Finance