Towards efficient large scale epidemiological simulations in EpiGraph Articles uri icon

publication date

  • February 2015

start page

  • 88

end page

  • 102

volume

  • 42

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0167-8191

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1872-7336

abstract

  • The work we present in this paper focuses on understanding the propagation of flu-like infectious outbreaks between geographically distant regions due to the movement of people outside their base location. Our approach incorporates geographic location and a transportation model into our existing region-based, closed-world EpiGraph simulator to model a more realistic movement of the virus between different geographic areas. This paper describes the MPI-based implementation of this simulator, including several optimization techniques such as a novel approach for mapping processes onto available processing elements based on the temporal distribution of process loads. We present an extensive evaluation of EpiGraph in terms of its ability to simulate large-scale scenarios, as well as from a performance perspective.

keywords

  • simulation; computational epidemiology; parallel algorithms; mpi implementation; resource allocation