🚀 go-pugleaf

                                     COLLOQUIUM

                University at Albany - State University of New York

                            Computer Science Department

                       High Performance Modeling of Epidemics

                                William A. Maniatty

                          Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

            Tuesday, March 30, 1999 at 4:00PM, in LI-98 (CS Conference Room)

                                      ABSTRACT

                 This talk focuses on the development of algorithms  and
            software  tools  supporting spatially explicit simulation of
            multi-species ecosystems.  Many  interesting  phenomena  are
            difficult to explore via computer simulation because limited
            computational resources tend  to  prevent  the  simulation's
            execution  within an acceptable time frame.  The performance
            of the simulation was  enhanced  by  careful  extraction  of
            parallelism  from  the underlying application.  The develop-
            ment of parallel tools to  model  epidemics  and  population
            dynamics  resulted in both computational and biological con-
            tributions.

                 The study of spatial and  temporal  aspects  of  multi-
            species biological systems is central to ecology.  Epidemics
            are significant to agriculture, public  health  and  ecology
            and  this  motivated their selection as an application area.
            Knowing where and when these phenomena occur can  be  useful
            for  applications  like  pest  control  and disease control.
            Various models of related  phenomena  and  high  performance
            computing  techniques for simulation were implemented.  Past
            and current research  issues  include:  innovative  modeling
            techniques,  design  of  parallel  algorithms, simulation of
            epidemics (including the  ecologically  significant  vector-

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            borne case) and performance analysis.  The integrated paral-
            lel simulation system was ported to several high performance
            computers,  including:  a MasPar MP-1, an IBM SP2, a network
            of workstations and an SGI Origin  2000.   Current  work  on
            parallel  simulation  of epidemics, using genetic algorithms
            to model evolutionary aspects of the spread of disease  will
            be presented.