DiFFuSE, a Distributed Framework for Cloud-Based Epidemic Simulations: A Case Study in Modelling the Spread of Bovine Viral Diarrhea Virus

Performing large-scale epidemic simulations is time-consuming and requires massive amounts of computing resources. An attractive option for providing such resources is cloud computing. However, fully exploiting cloud resources requires converting existing simulation applications into elastic, cloud-enabled applications. To this end, this paper proposes a novel service-based framework for building and executing epidemic simulations in the cloud and describes how the framework was applied to build a cloud-enabled simulation of the spread of the bovine viral diarrhea virus. The paper provides experimental evidence that the framework increases performance and allows exploring cost-performance trade-offs while automatically handling failures and supporting elastic allocation of resources from multiple clouds.