CSSSA - December Webinar

Title: Distributed Agent-based Simulation with Repast4Py

Abstract:

The increasing availability of high-performance computing (HPC) has accelerated the potential for applying computational simulation to capture ever more granular features of large, complex systems. This talk presents Repast4Py, the newest member of the Repast Suite of agent-based modeling toolkits. Repast4Py is a Python agent-based modeling framework that provides the ability to build large, MPI-distributed agent-based models (ABM) that span multiple processing cores across multiple computing nodes. Simplifying the process of constructing large-scale ABMs, Repast4Py is designed to provide an easier on-ramp for researchers from diverse scientific communities to apply distributed ABM methods. We will present key Repast4Py components and how they are combined to create distributed simulations of different types, building on three example models that implement seven common distributed ABM use cases. We will conclude by illustrating the relationship between model structure and performance considerations, providing guidance on how to leverage Repast4Py features to develop well designed and performant distributed ABMs. 

Bios: 

Nick Collier is a Senior Software Engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, and Staff Software Engineer in the Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering at the University of Chicago. As the lead developer for the Repast project for agent-based modeling toolkits and co-developer of the Extreme-scale Model Exploration with Swift (EMEWS) framework, he develops, architects, and implements large-scale agent-based models and frameworks, and large-scale model exploration workflows across various domains. 

Jonathan Ozik is a Principal Computational Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, Senior Scientist with Department of Public Health Sciences affiliation in the Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering (CASE) at the University of Chicago, and Senior Institute Fellow in the Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering (NAISE) at Northwestern University. He is the lead of the Repast project for agent-based modeling toolkits and the Extreme-scale Model Exploration with Swift (EMEWS) framework for large-scale model exploration on high-performance computing resources.