GPGCloud: Model Sharing and Execution Environment Service for Simulation of International Politics and Economics

Simulation-based studies have attracted the attention of researchers of social science like politics and economics, and many findings are given in those domains through simulations. In spite of successful results, it has long been pointed out that there are relatively high bars for those researchers to newly adopt these approaches. We consider that one of them is the large cost related to programming, which is not only learning it but also understanding other researchers' work represented both in their papers and in their codes. Another is the cost for introducing and managing computer systems required to perform efficient researches. We propose a system, GPGCloud, which helps users to share their simulation models with others, to cope with the programming related cost. It also provides an easy access to a large computation environment that allows them to simultaneously perform a number of simulation runs based on their models, which reduces the cost on managing large computers. We implemented a prototype of GPGCloud, which consists of several parts built on top of well-known open-source softwares. This paper describes the design and the implementation of the system.