Global Epidemic Simulator
Project information
People:
Funders:
Diseases: Influenza, malaria
Countries involved: Global scope
Collaborators:
- Dr Stephen Emmott and colleagues, Microsoft Research Ltd, Cambridge, UK.
This project is developing a software platform to simulate the emergence and spread of new infectious disease epidemics across the globe. The simulator will be unique in modelling the entire population of the world, and in simulating population movements and contacts at all scales – from within each household to intercontinental travel. Such a model has the potential to revolutionise our ability to understand, visualise and potentially predict patterns of spread of both novel and emerging pathogens and the impact of possible control measures. In addition to developing the simulation platform, the project will develop new methods for parameter estimation and validation for such large-scale models. It will be also necessary to collate (and in some cases synthesise) detailed demographic data for all areas of the world at a fine spatial scale, coupled to data on the movement of human populations at both local and international scales
The project will also require the development of novel high performance computing methods centred around the efficient parallelisation of an agent based simulation of 6.5 billion individuals with significant non-local interactions between individuals. Analysis and visualisation of model output will also be a software development challenge.
