High performance informatics for pandemic preparedness

Pandemics such as H1N1 influenza are global outbreaks of infectious disease. Human behavior, social contact networks, and pandemics are closely intertwined. The ordinary behavior and daily activities of individuals create varied and dense social interactions that are characteristic of modern urban societies. They provide a perfect fabric for rapid, uncontrolled disease propagation. Individuals' changing behaviors in response to public policies and their evolving perception of how an infectious disease outbreak is unfolding can dramatically alter normal social interactions. Effective planning and response strategies must take these complicated interactions into account. Recent quantitative changes in high performance computing and networking have created new opportunities for collecting, integrating, analyzing and accessing information related to such large social contact networks and epidemic outbreaks. The paper will describe our efforts to build a Cyber Infrastructure for EPIdemics (CIEPI) - a high performance computing oriented decision-support environment to support planning and response in the event of epidemics.