Seminar on VECMAtk and the impact of uncertainty on predictions of the CovidSim epidemiological code

Seminar on VECMAtk and the impact of uncertainty on predictions of the CovidSim epidemiological code

You are invited to join an online seminar on VECMAtk and the impact of uncertainty on predictions of the CovidSim epidemiological code, which takes place on 10:00UK/11:00CET, Friday 16 April

This seminar covers two related subjects:

1) Speaker: Dr Derek Groen, Brunel University London
The first part of the seminar introduces the VECMA Toolkit (VECMAtk). The toolkit enables automated Verification, Validation and Uncertainty Quantification (VVUQ) for complex single- and multi-scale applications that can be deployed on emerging exascale platforms and provides support for software applications for any domain of interest. The toolkit provides a variety range of tools to:

  • create VVUQ procedures (EasyVVUQ),
  • to facilitate the creation of surrogate models for multiscale simulations (EasySurrogate)
  • to automate the complex workflows emerging from these procedures (FabSim3),
  • to enable the efficient execution of large numbers of jobs on computational resources (QCG Pilot Job Manager),
  • to provide convenient means to use HPC facilities for users (QCG-Now) and user-developers (FabSim3 and QCG-Client),
  • and to make creating coupled multiscale simulations easy, and to then enable efficient Uncertainty Quantification of such models using advanced semi-intrusive algorithms (MUSCLE3)

2) Speaker: Wouter Edeling, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
The second part of the seminar covers an application of VECMAtk. Epidemiological modelling has assisted in identifying interventions that reduce the impact of COVID-19. The UK government relied, in part, on the CovidSim model to guide its policy to contain the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic during March and April 2020; however, CovidSim contains several sources of uncertainty that affect the quality of its predictions: parametric uncertainty, model structure uncertainty and scenario uncertainty. Our research, recently published in Nature Computational Science, examined parametric sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification of the code using components of VECMAtk.

You can join the seminar using the following zoom link.