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ABC inference is highly amenable to efficient hardware acceleration. In this work, we develop parallel ABC inference of a stochastic epidemiology model for COVID-19. The statistical inference framework is implemented and compared on Intel\u2019s Xeon CPU, NVIDIA\u2019s Tesla V100 GPU, Google\u2019s V2 Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), and the Graphcore\u2019s Mk1 Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), and the results are discussed in the context of their computational architectures. Results show that TPUs are 3\u00d7, GPUs are 4\u00d7, and IPUs are 30\u00d7 faster than Xeon CPUs. Extensive performance analysis indicates that the difference between IPU and GPU can be attributed to higher communication bandwidth, closeness of memory to compute, and higher compute power in the IPU. The proposed framework scales across 16 IPUs, with scaling overhead not exceeding 8% for the experiments performed. We present an example of our framework in practice, performing inference on the epidemiology model across three countries and giving a brief overview of the results.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3471188","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,1,12]],"date-time":"2022-01-12T14:06:38Z","timestamp":1641996398000},"page":"1-24","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":7,"title":["Hardware-accelerated Simulation-based Inference of Stochastic Epidemiology Models for COVID-19"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"18","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7003-0828","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sourabh","family":"Kulkarni","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Massachusetts Amherst, Massachusetts, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Mario Michael","family":"Krell","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Graphcore, Palo Alto, CA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Seth","family":"Nabarro","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Graphcore Research, Bristol, UK"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Csaba Andras","family":"Moritz","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Massachusetts Amherst, Massachusetts, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,1,12]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_2_2","unstructured":"Mart\u00edn Abadi Ashish Agarwal Paul Barham Eugene Brevdo Zhifeng Chen Craig Citro Greg S. 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