Case Study: RTI International achieves 250× faster epidemic simulations with MathWorks MATLAB and Parallel Computing Toolbox

RTI International and University of Pennsylvania Model the Spread of Epidemics Using MATLAB and Parallel Computing

RTI International, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, faced the challenge of predicting and controlling the spread of infectious diseases by running sophisticated stochastic epidemic models and millions of Monte Carlo simulations. They needed tools that would let researchers rapidly prototype models, visualize results for nontechnical stakeholders, and scale simulations on clusters without heavy programming overhead, so they used MathWorks products including MATLAB, Parallel Computing Toolbox, and MATLAB Parallel Server.

MathWorks solutions were used to parallelize the MATLAB epidemic models on a 64-node cluster and the TeraGrid, with RTI adding only a few lines of code and simple task-management scripts to distribute work. Using MathWorks tools, RTI reused code to cut development time by 80%, completed simulations 250 times faster (reducing months of computation to days), and produced standalone applications that helped public-health and emergency-response personnel evaluate control policies.

RTI International

Diglio Simoni

Senior Computational Scientist