LASER vs EMOD

Purpose

We were asked to do a little "apples-to-apples", bare metal comparison of LASER and EMOD.

Design

• Scenario: Measles in England & Wales​
• Population: ~500k agents at the start of simulation
• Nodes: 950-1450​
• Duration: 10 Years
• Sampling: Full in time and people
• Platform: COMPS​
• Parellelization: Multicore​

Features

• SEIR
• Migration
• No interventions
• Seasonality
• Maternal Immunity

Discrepancies

• EMOD has disease deaths
• Endemicity is robust to population scaling in EMOD but seems to require recalibration in LASER prototype.

Results

EMOD: EMOD runs in about 66 minutes while LASER runs in about 35 seconds.

Open Items

• Scaling population up and down in EMOD doesn't seem to be playing nicely with how fertility was being done in the example with the result that the CBR seems to be doubling (too many babies) in the "800k population" version.
• Going with 375k -- 1/10 the the original -- seems to preserve the fertility CBR of ~19 without further investigation.