Events

Workshop sponsored by the ExCALIBUR-ECP Exchange Programme

18-20 March 2025, The Study Studio, Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London, UK

Agenda

Tuesday 18 March

12:30 Arrival and Lunch

14:00 Introduction to the ExAMPLER project (Gary Polhill, The James Hutton Institute)

14:30 Agent-based modelling on GPUs with FLAME GPU (Paul Richmond, University of Sheffield)

15:30 Coffee

16:00 Future directions for NetLogo: Lower Threshold, Higher Ceiling (Jacob Kelter, Northwestern University)

17:00 General discussion

17:30 Close

18:30 Dinner: Antalya Restaurant, 103-105 Southampton Row, London WC1B 4HH

Wednesday 19 March

09:00 Arrival and Coffee

09:30 Hands-on Cloud-Based FLAME GPU Tutorial (Paul Richmond)

10:30 Running NetLogo on ARCHER-2 (Gary Polhill)

11:00 Coffee

11:30 Requirements discussion

12:30 Lunch and departure of people who are not staying for the hackathon

14:00 Hackathon: Deciding on options

14:30 Hackathon: Break out into small groups and start hacking

15:30 Coffee

16:00 Hackathon: More hacking

17:00 Hackathon: Report back in plenary

17:30 Close

18:30 Dinner: Tas Bloomsbury, 22 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QJ

Thursday 20 March

09:00 Arrival and Coffee

09:30 Hackathon: Recap and plan for the day

10:00 (or before) Hackathon: More hacking in small groups

11:00 Coffee

11:30 Report back in plenary and closing remarks (Gary Polhill)

12:00 Lunch

Join us at the Social Simulation Conference in Kraków on 16-20 September for our Workshop on A Roadmap to Exascale Agent-Based Modelling. The workshop is open to anyone attending the conference.

Gary Polhill is delivering a half-day course on High Performance Computing for Agent-Based Models at the 24th European Agent Systems Summer School at the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin. The course will cover the following topics:

We are organizing a workshop at the International Environmental Modelling & Software Society's Biennial Congress, which is being held at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Centre at Michigan State University's East Lansing Campus from 23-27 June 2024. The workshop will build on our earlier visioning workshops to develop insights into how  transformative change in agent-based modelling practice could be realized through reimagined software architectures and institutions supporting high-performance computing use. Look out for WSF2 in the conference schedule!

The "Roadmap to Agent-Based Modelling at Exascale" workshop on 29-30 April 2024, the Clarice Pears Building, University of Glasgow. This workshop follows on from visioning workshops that took place at the Social Simulation Conference (September 2023) and UCL (November 2023) to outline what needs to be done to bring those visions into reality. Attending the earlier workshops is not necessary to make a valuable contribution to the workshop at the University of Glasgow.

Provisional agenda:

29 April

10:30 Arrival, registration and coffee

11:00 Welcome and introduction to the workshop

• Gary Polhill (The James Hutton Institute) – A roadmap towards exascale agent-based modelling: A brief overview of the ExAMPLER project
• Richard Milton (CASA, University College London) – Identifying the crucial challenges for ABSS at exascale

11:30 Experts' experiences using high-performance computing with agent-based models

• Peter Challenor (Exeter) – Gaussian process emulation: a tool for computationally expensive modelling
• Louise Kimpton (Exeter) – Gaussian Process Emulation with Agent Based Models: A Worked Example

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Experts' experiences continued

• Diana Suleimenova (Brunel) & Arindam Saha (UCL) Applications of Exascale Agent-based Modelling: Predicting Migration Patterns and Infectious Diseases
• Brief presentation by Warwick Economics and Development (Alex Owen-Doyle and Andrew Ledger) on their work evaluating the Strategic Priorities Fund ExCALIBUR Programme (through which ExAMPLER is funded)
• Sarah Wise (CASA, UCL) Complex symptoms: understanding epidemics from the perspective of complexity science

14:30 Coffee

14:45 Workshop

• Introduction by Michael Batty (CASA, UCL). Exascale requirements as identified in the previous 'visions' workshops; synergies with other areas – e.g. econometrics, microsimulation, housing and transport

15:00 Group work

• What needs to be done to achieve parallelization / accelerator exascale Agent-Based Social Simulation?

15:30 Group discussion

• Drafting a roadmap for exascale ABM

16:45 Wrap-up

17:00 Close of day 1

19:00 Workshop dinner, Kelvin Suite, Grosvenor Hotel

30 April

09:00 Arrival and coffee

09:30 Group work

• How to get from here to there – migration of tools, development of new tools, processes for ABSS modelling?
• Evolution of existing methodology into exascale ABM. Revolutionary ideas for changing how ABM is achieved at exascale. What are the science drivers for exascale ABM?

11:30 Coffee

12:00 Presentation of group work

13:00 Lunch

14:00 Plenary discussion and next steps

15:00 Finish