Scaling and using large pandemic agent-based models

ABSTRACT

The NIH NIGMS MIDAS grant is focused on building global agent-based models for studying world-wide epidemics. As the chief architect of the MIDAS project, I am part of a team providing informatics support to our researchers from Hopkins, Emory, and Virginia Tech. Because of the number of agents and complex social networks we are dealing with, our models tend to require very large amounts of computational resources. We are working with a combination of high level modeling tools, automated means of scaling models and balancing work across grids and clusters, and sophisticated tools for managing complex simulation experiments. A goal is to integrate these functions into a software workbench that minimizes many of the distractions on the researchers in order to allow them to stay focused in a rapid iterative research and development mode.