Loimos: A Large-Scale Epidemic Simulation Framework for Realistic SocialContact Networks

Global pandemics can wreak havoc and lead to significant social, economic and
personal losses. Preventing the spread of infectious diseases requires
interventions at different levels needing the study of potential impact
and efficacy of those preemptive measures. Modeling epidemic diffusion and
possible interventions can help us in this goal. Agent-based models have been
used effectively in the past to model contagion processes. We present Loimos, a
highly parallel simulation of epidemic diffusion written on top of the Charm++
asynchronous task-based system. Loimos uses a hybrid time-stepped and
discrete-event simulation to model disease spread. We demonstrate that our
implementation of Loimos is able to scale on to large core counts on different
HPC platforms such as Theta at ALCF and Rivanna at the University of Virginia.