A NeISS collaboration to develop and use e-infrastructure for large-scale social simulation

Doherty, T., Skipsey, S. , Turner, A. and Watt, J. (2011) A NeISS collaboration to develop and use e-infrastructure for large-scale social simulation. In: UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2011, York, United Kingdom, 26-26 Sep 2011,

Abstract

The National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) project is focused on developing e-Infrastructure to support social simulation research. Part of NeISS aims to provide an interface for running contemporary dynamic demographic social simulation models as developed in the GENESIS project. These GENESIS models operate at the individual person level and are stochastic. This paper focuses on support for a simplistic demographic change model that has a daily time steps, and is typically run for a number of years. A portal based Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed as a set of standard portlets. One portlet is for specifying model parameters and setting a simulation running. Another is for comparing the results of different simulation runs. Other portlets are for monitoring submitted jobs and for interfacing with an archive of results. A layer of programs enacted by the portlets stage data in and submit jobs to a Grid computer which then runs a specific GENESIS model program executable. Once a job is submitted, some details are communicated back to a job monitoring portlet. Once the job is completed, results are stored and made available for download and further processing. Collectively we call the system the Genesis Simulator. Progress in the development of the Genesis Simulator was presented at the UK e- Science All Hands Meeting in September 2011 by way of a video based demonstration of the GUI, and an oral presentation of a working paper. Since then, an automated framework has been developed to run simulations for a number of years in yearly time steps. The demographic models have also been improved in a number of ways. This paper summarises the work to date, presents some of the latest results and considers the next steps we are planning in this work.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Keywords: social simulation, demographic, stochastic, model, grid, e-Infrastructure, automate, framework, NeISS, GENESIS
• Status: Published
• Refereed: No
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Doherty, Mr Thomas and Watt, Dr John and Skipsey, Dr Samuel
• Authors: Doherty, T., Skipsey, S., Turner, A., and Watt, J.
• Subjects: Q Science > Q Science (General)
• College/School: University Services > IT Services > E-Science; College of Science and Engineering > School of Physics and Astronomy; College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2011 The Authors
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced with the permission of the authors