Serverless Approach to Sensitivity Analysis of Computational Models

Piotr Kica, Magdalena Otta, Krzysztof Czechowicz, Karol Zając, Piotr Nowakowski, Andrew Narracott, Ian Halliday, Maciej Malawski

Digital twins are virtual representations of physical objects or systems used for the purpose of analysis, most often via computer simulations, in many engineering and scientific disciplines. Recently, this approach has been introduced to computational medicine, within the concept of Digital Twin in Healthcare (DTH). Such research requires verification and validation of its models, as well as the corresponding sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ). From the computing perspective, VVUQ is a computationally intensive process, as it requires numerous runs with variations of input parameters. Researchers often use high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to run VVUQ studies where the number of parameter combinations can easily reach tens of thousands. However, there is a viable alternative to HPC for a substantial subset of computational models – serverless computing. In this paper we hypothesize that using the serverless computing model can be a practical and efficient approach to selected cases of running VVUQ calculations. We show this on the example of the EasyVVUQ library, which we extend by providing support for many serverless services. The resulting library – CloudVVUQ – is evaluated using two real-world applications from the computational medicine domain adapted for serverless execution. Our experiments demonstrate the scalability of the proposed approach.