The National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) project is focused on
developing e-Infrastructure to support social simulation research. Part of NeISS aims to
provide an interface for running contemporary dynamic demographic social simulation
models as developed in the GENESIS project. These GENESIS models operate at the
individual person level and are stochastic. This paper focuses on support for a simplistic
demographic change model that has a daily time steps, and is typically run for a number
of years.
A portal based Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed as a set
of standard portlets. One portlet is for specifying model parameters and setting a
simulation running. Another is for comparing the results of different simulation runs.
Other portlets are for monitoring submitted jobs and for interfacing with an archive of
results. A layer of programs enacted by the portlets stage data in and submit jobs to a
Grid computer which then runs a specific GENESIS model program executable. Once a
job is submitted, some details are communicated back to a job monitoring portlet. Once
the job is completed, results are stored and made available for download and further
processing. Collectively we call the system the Genesis Simulator.
Progress in the development of the Genesis Simulator was presented at the UK e-
Science All Hands Meeting in September 2011 by way of a video based demonstration
of the GUI, and an oral presentation of a working paper. Since then, an automated
framework has been developed to run simulations for a number of years in yearly time
steps. The demographic models have also been improved in a number of ways. This
paper summarises the work to date, presents some of the latest results and considers the
next steps we are planning in this work
