Parallel simulation of the global epidemiology of Avian Influenza

SEARUMS is an eco-modeling, bio-simulation, and analysis environment to study the global epidemiology of Avian Influenza. Originally developed in Java, SEARUMS enables comprehensive epidemiological analysis, forecast epicenters, and time lines of epidemics for prophylaxis; thereby mitigating disease outbreaks. However, SEARUMS-based simulations were time consuming due to the size and complexity of the models. In an endeavor to reduce time for simulation, we have redesigned the infrastructure of SEARUMS to operate as a time warp synchronized, parallel and distributed simulation. This paper presents our parallelization efforts along with empirical evaluation of various design alternatives that were explored to identify the ideal parallel simulation configuration. Our experiments indicate that the redesigned environment called SEARUMS++ achieves good scalability and performance, thus meeting a mission-critical objective.