Main Reading Room, Library of Congress (Credit: Carol M. Highsmith, Public Domain)
SUBTOPIC

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:

Contact Data Anonymized mobility, social ties Graph Engine CPU Nodes Large-memory graph build GPU Nodes Diffusion & centrality models Network Structure & community detection Spread Model Information or epidemic dynamics Policy Insight & intervention design Observed outcomes recalibrate the diffusion model for the next simulation run

Running on the TOP500: Anvil

TOP500 — DEBUT MAY 2022 LIST

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.

#143
TOP500 Rank at Debut (2022)
5.1
Peak Petaflops

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.

Read article
Rosen Center for Advanced Computing

Purdue University

On how Anvil has helped over 12,000 researchers across fields including epidemiology and social science push the boundaries of scientific exploration.

Read article