An effective tool used by planners and policy makers in public health, such as Center for Disease Control (CDC), to curtail spread of infectious diseases over a given population is contagion diffusion simulations. These simulations model the relevant characteristics of the population (age, gender, income etc.) and the disease (attack rate, etc.) and compute the spread under various configuration and plausible intervention strategies (such as vaccinations, school closure, etc.). Hence, the model and the computation form a complex agent based system and are highly compute and resource intensive. In this work, we design a benchmark consisting of several kernels which capture the essential compute, communication, and data access patterns for such applications. For each kernel, the benchmark provides different evaluation strategies. The goal is to (a) derive alternative implementations for computing the contagion by combining different implementation of the kernels, and (b) evaluate which combination of implementation, runtime, and hardware is most effective in running large scale contagion diffusion simulations. Our proposed benchmark is designed using C++ generic programming primitives and lifting sequential strategies for parallel computations. Together, these lead to a succinct description of the benchmark and significant code reuse when deriving strategies for new hardware. For the benchmark to be effective, this aspect is crucial, because the potential combination of hardware and runtime are growing rapidly thereby making infeasible to write optimized strategy for the complete contagion diffusion from ground up for each compute system. / Master of Science

Recently multi-core processors have become very popular in computer systems. It allows multiple threads to be executed simultaneously. The advantage of multi-core comes by parallelizing codes to expand the work across hardware. Furthermore, this can be done by using a parallel environment developed by M.I.T. called Intel Cilk Plus, which is design to provide an easy and well-structured parallel programming approach.      Intel Cilk Plus is an extension of C and C++ programming languages that describes data parallelism. This extension is very helpful and easy to use among other languages in this field. It has different features including keywords, reducers and array notations etc. In general, this article describes Intel Cilk Plus and its features. In addition, Unified Modelling Language, activity diagrams are used in term of graphical modelling of Intel Cilk Plus by describing the process of a system, capturing the dynamic behaviour of it and representing the flow from one activity to another using control flow. Later on Intel Cilk Plus keywords and UML diagrams tools will be evaluated, a comparison of different UML modelling tools will also be provided.