Running a simulation

The EMOD executable (Eradication.exe) consumes the input data files, configuration file, and, optionally, campaign file to run simulations that model disease dynamics and campaign efficacy. You have a few different options for running simulations. The option you choose will depend upon whether you want to run one or more simulations, to run simulations locally or on a remote cluster (for large simulations or multiple simulations), or to run simulations for debugging the source code. This topic briefly describes the different options you have for running simulations.

Run a single simulation

You will generally want to run simulations using the EMOD command-line options. This will run a single simulation and put the output files in a local directory.

You must either download the latest version of Eradication.exe from GitHub or clone the EMOD source from GitHub and build Eradication.exe yourself. This gives you access to the latest features and parameters for EMOD.

Run multiple simulations

Because the EMOD model is stochastic, simulations must be run multiple times to return scientifically valid results. Therefore, you have the following options to run multiple simulations at a time, either locally or remotely on a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. Generally, only small simulations should be run locally.

Many of these options are scripting languages that you can also use to modify the files consumed by EMOD, simplifying your workflow when running many simulations.

Run simulations for debugging

If you are helping advance the EMOD model by contributing to source code, there are other options for running simulations that provide debugging support. These options for running simulations are not recommended if you are not modifying the source code.

You can run a simulation locally from Visual Studio using the built-in debugger. You will be able to put in breakpoints and step through the code while inspecting the values of different state variables throughout the simulation.

You can use regression_test.py in the GitHub Regression directory to run multiple simulations on a cluster, including running the suite of regression tests run by the IDM testing team.