Peter,

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. Here is the upshot of my
talks with Geoffrey and others about the project.

For this project we plan to have: 
- 1 NPAC staff person (Chou-Wei Ou) working half-time on program development
- Myself working 20-25% of my time on program and algorithm design
- Geoffrey working a small percentage of his time on ideas and algorithms
- Help from various people at NPAC with computer systems, NT expertise, etc.
Total effort would be about 1 full-time equivalent staff person, which costs
NPAC roughly $150K per year, including all overhead etc.

I have looked at the code and documentation that Miloje wrote and I believe
that we should be able to implement a prototype path integral Monte Carlo
simulator in 2-3 months. This would include a program to specify probability 
distribution parameters using historical data. It would run on multiple 
processors on an NT machine.

Since the problem is different to the one for Sailfish, a number of things 
will need to be changed from Miloje's code. We will also need a fairly precise 
specification of what the input data will be and what output is expected, 
and some sample data to test the system. 

Geoffrey expects that sorting out a formal contract with the university will 
take a few months, so that a formal project could probably not begin before
July. However it would be possible for us to work on developing a prototype 
during that time if you were to join NPAC's Infomall technology transfer 
program, which does not require university approval and can therefore be done
immediately. The cost for this would be $25K, which is roughly the cost of the 
2-3 FTE-months that it will take us to develop the prototype.
 
In the meantime we could negotiate a longer-term contract for ongoing 
development work, which would have to go through the university and would be 
unlikely to be finalized before July.