The CSS seminar speaker for Friday, October 27 will be Dale K Brearcliffe, MAIS-CSS student, George Mason University. Dales’s talk entitled “Parallelization of Entity-Based Models in Computational Social Science: A Hardware Perspective” (abstract below) is scheduled to begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.
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Abstract: The use of simulations in exploring theories and hypotheses by social scientists is well documented. As computer systems have grown in capacity, so have interests by social scientists in executing larger simulations. Social scientists often approach their simulation design from the top down by selecting an Entity-Based Model (EBM) framework from those that are readily available, thus limiting modeling capability to the chosen framework. Ultimately, the framework is dependent upon what is at the bottom, the hardware that serves as the foundation of the computing system. One underused hardware architecture supports the simultaneous execution of a problem split into multiple pieces. Thus, the problem is solved faster in parallel. In this seminar, a selection of parallel hardware architectures is examined with a goal of providing support for EBMs. The hardware’s capability to support parallelization of EBMs is described and contrasted. A simple EBM is tested to illustrate these capabilities and implementation challenges specific to parallel hardware are explored.