Sociology & Networks
Mapping how a rumor, a disease, or a migration crosses a graph of billions of edges.
Image: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress
Graphs at the Scale of a Population
Network science treats society as a graph: nodes are individuals, edges are relationships, contacts, or communication events. At population scale — millions of nodes, billions of edges — computing centrality, community structure, or epidemic spread requires memory-dense HPC nodes rather than a single workstation. Combined with anonymized population mobility data, this lets researchers model information diffusion, disease spread, and migration patterns with a fidelity that was computationally out of reach a decade ago. Malgukke's large-memory and GPU-accelerated graph architectures are built for exactly this workload.
HPC Solution Architecture: Raw Contacts to Population Model
A large-scale network analysis pipeline, comparable to workflows run on NSF ACCESS systems like Anvil:
Running on the TOP500: Anvil
Anvil, Purdue University's flagship research supercomputer, debuted at No. 143 on the May 2022 TOP500 list with a peak processing speed of 5.1 petaflops. Funded by the NSF and delivered through ACCESS, Anvil was explicitly built — in the words of its project director — "with a focus on usability and easy access for those in traditionally under-served domains," and has since supported researchers across epidemiology, sociology, and network science.
Yes — this is a real, currently operating TOP500-ranked system, directly serving the population-scale network research described on this page.
Voices from the Field
Carol Song
Senior Research Scientist, Rosen Center for Advanced Computing; Project Director, Anvil
On building Anvil with a focus on usability and easy access for researchers in traditionally under-served domains, including the social sciences.
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Purdue University
On how Anvil has helped over 12,000 researchers across fields including epidemiology and social science push the boundaries of scientific exploration.
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