Scalable agent-based modelling with cloud HPC resources for social simulations

New concepts like agent-based modelling are providing social scientists with new tools, more suited to their background than other simulation techniques. The success of this new trend will be strongly related to the existence of simulation tools capable of fulfilling the needs of these disciplines. Given the computational requirement of realistic agent-based models, high-performance computing infrastructure is often necessary to perform the calculations. At present, such resources are unlikely to be available to humanities researchers. Having developed Pandora, an open-source framework designed to create and execute large-scale social simulations in high-performance computing environments, this work presents an evaluation of the impact of cloud computing within this context. We find that the constraints of the cloud environment do not have a significant impact on the generic pattern of execution, providing a cost-effective solution for social scientists.