HPCgen A Fast Generator of Contact Networks of Large Urban Cities for Epidemiological Studies

A contact network is the well representation of heterogeneous contact behaviors within the population. Incorporating contact networks as well as community structures is important in realistic modeling and simulation for the spread of infectious diseases. We developed the ¿HPCgen¿, a fast and generic generator of contact networks of large urban cities, with the capacity of automating network re-generations for intervention studies. The produced contact networks are applicable in both analytical modeling and agent-based simulations. In this paper, we presented the design and realization of HPCgen followed by the empirical results of building Singapore contact networks with six types of community structures in the common urban settings. The results showed our 8-node parallelized HPCgen could generated a contact network of 3.4 million populations within 62.17 seconds, which is 90% reduction of runtime.