At the present, one of the real-life problems we were interested in was what was or is  an effective economic strategy for Ghana. Ghana has an opportunity in the form of offshore hydrocarbon deposits. Of interest is that these can be extracted without too many technical, climate or governmental problems. Ghana has several very serious challenges in the form of AIDS, malaria, an inadequate education infrastructure, a rising population, not enough doctors and widespread poverty. A technical difficulty for us is it is unclear how accurate various measures are, so instead of simply taking 11% unemployment on faith, we might vary the values from 8% to 18%. For some measures there is more sensitivity so one might to step through by tenths or hundredths of a percent. Accordingly, it is not unusual for us to calculate many millions of scenarios. Note that all of the machines have hyperthreading. L1 refers to level one cache, L2 to level two ... 

 

Name	OS	CPU	Cores	Speed	L1 instruction	L1 data	L2
Netbook	Windows 7	Atom N450	1	1.66 GHz	32 Kb 8-way	24 Kb 6-way	512 Kb 8-way
Tablet	Windows 7	Atom N450	1	1.66 Ghz	32 Kb 8-way	24 Kb 6-way	512 Kb 8-way
Desktop	Windows7	Core 2 Quad Q8300	4	2.50 Ghz	4 x 32 Kb 8-way	4 x 32 Kb 8-way	4096 Kb 8-way
Win 7 Ultra	Windows 7	Core i5 2557M	2	1.70 Ghz	2 x 32 Kb 8-way	2 x 32 Kb 8-way	512 Kb 8-way
Win 8 Ultra	Windows 8	Core i7 3667U	2	2.00 Ghz	2 x 32 Kb 8-way	2 x 32 Kb 8-way	512 Kb 8-way