Case Study: Northeastern University speeds Zika outbreak modeling with Google Cloud Platform

Researchers at Northeastern use Google Cloud Platform to model Zika’s spread

Northeastern University’s Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems (MoBS) lab needed a fast, scalable way to model the spread of Zika as the virus moved through the Americas. Working with Google for Education and Google Cloud Platform, the team sought better prediction tools to help public health officials understand infection rates, locations, and outbreak scenarios.

Google for Education’s Google Cloud Platform solution gave Northeastern University access to Google Compute Engine, Preemptible Virtual Machines, Google BigQuery, and Google Cloud Storage to run large-scale simulations and analyze massive datasets. The result was more than 10 million simulations completed, with modeling and analysis time cut from weeks to hours, and full epidemic scenario analyses running in less than a day.

Northeastern University

Matteo Chinazzi

Associate Research Scientist