Kale Leads Effort to Create Petascale Modeling Techniques to Study Extreme-Scale Social Networks

Computer Science professor Sanjay Kale and the Parallel Programming Lab (PPL) of the University of Illinois are part of a collaborative group that has been awarded a $1.45 million grant to develop petascale computing environments that model billions of individuals in extremely large social and information networks. 

The goal of the proposal "Coupled Models of Diffusion and Individual Behavior Over Extremely Large Social Networks" is to use new computer technology breakthroughs to study events like disease pandemics, financial crises, as well as the spread of opinions, attitudes or social beliefs, through populations on a global scale. Current state-of-the-art agent-based computer models can simulate the spread of a disease like influenza through a population the size of the United States. Petascale modeling would make comparable agent-based studies of disease transmission possible for global populations.

Professor Kale will lead the Illinois effort to construct a petascale computational modeling environment – MTML-Sim – that will scale to billions of individuals and their social and information networks. The scaling will be achieved by developing innovative parallel algorithms as well as their implementations that will allow researchers to map the networks on petascale computing environments that are in the process of being built and deployed at places such as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This environment will be used to test simultaneously multiple theories of social interaction amongst individuals and groups.

"Our efforts will focus on improving the performance and productivity of agent-based modeling applications on these 100,000+ processor petascale computer architectures,” said Kale. “Guided by direct collaboration with application developers, we will make enhancements to the Charm++ runtime system and associated performance analysis tools, which will give us a handle on designing and improving the software environment to accelerate application development for the next generation of petascale computer systems."

The project will be lead by the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL) at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech, and includes partners at the Brookings Institution, Indiana University, Northwestern University.  The team will work together to develop models and algorithms that support the work of researchers, policy- and decision-makers who want to examine and probe individual and group behaviors in these extremely large global social networks. Kale’s Parallel Programming researcher’s effort will focus on modifying and implementing enhancements to the Charm ++ runtime system to support MTML-Sim. This environment will provide a stable and scalable software platform for the petascale application developers. 

Madhav Marathe, Deputy Director of the NDSSL and Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at Virginia Tech and Principal Investigator on the proposal, remarked: "Underpinning this project is a desire to create some of the next-generation computational tools and environments that will be needed to enable future research by social, biological and computational scientists We anticipate unprecedented increases in scaling and execution speeds for computer processors in the years ahead. These improvements will make it possible to look in parallel at multiple diffusions and behaviors as they evolve and influence different interactions in these extremely large social networks. We hope to be able to resolve these large networks of interactions all the way down to the level of the individual. Representing the coupled and co-evolving aspects of the networks and their constituent elements is a significant computing challenge, one that needs to be met if we are to understand these complex socio-technical phenomena."