A Distributed Platform for Global-Scale Agent-Based Models of Disease Transmission

Authored by Joshua M. Epstein, Jon Parker

Date Published: 2011-12

DOI: 10.1145/2043635.2043637

Sponsors: United States Office of Naval Research (ONR) The DHS National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response (PACER) Johns Hopkins University University of Pittsburgh United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) United States National Science Foundation (NSF) United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Platforms: Java

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Flow charts Pseudocode

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

The Global-Scale Agent Model (GSAM) is presented. The GSAM is a high-performance distributed platform for agent-based epidemic modeling capable of simulating a disease outbreak in a population of several billion agents. It is unprecedented in its scale, its speed, and its use of Java. Solutions to multiple challenges inherent in distributing massive agent-based models are presented. Communication, synchronization, and memory usage are among the topics covered in detail. The memory usage discussion is Java specific. However, the communication and synchronization discussions apply broadly. We provide benchmarks illustrating the GSAM's speed and scalability.

Tags

Agent-based modeling Epidemiology agent behavior