Architecture-Aware Modeling of Pedestrian Dynamics

The spread of infectious diseases arises from complex interactions between disease dynamics and human behavior. Predicting the outcome of this complex system is difficult. Consequently, there has been a recent emphasis on comparing the relative risks of different policy options rather than precise predictions. Here, one performs a parameter sweep to generate a large number of possible scenarios for human behavior under different policy options and identifies the relative risks of different decisions regarding policy or design choices. In particular, this approach has been used to identify effective approaches to social distancing in crowded locations, with pedestrian dynamics used to simulate the movement of individuals. This incurs a large computational load, though. The traditional approach of optimizing the implementation of existing mathematical models on parallel systems leads to a moderate improvement in computational performance. In contrast, we show that when dealing with human behavior, we can create a model from scratch that takes computer architectural features into account, yielding much higher performance without requiring complicated parallelization efforts. Our solution is based on two key observations. (i) Models do not capture human behavior as precisely as models for scientific phenomena describe natural processes. Consequently, there is some leeway in designing a model to suit the computational architecture. (ii) The result of a parameter sweep, rather than a single simulation, is the semantically meaningful result. Our model leverages these features to perform efficiently on CPUs and GPUs. We obtain a speedup factor of around 60 using this new model on two Xeon Platinum 8280 CPUs and a factor 125 speedup on 4 NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs over a parallel implementation of the existing model. The careful design of a GPU implementation makes it fast enough for real-time decision-making. We illustrate it on an application to COVID-19.