Accelerating solution of a moral hazard problem with Swift

The study of human interactions and the modeling of social structures often needs large scale experiments that involve complex models and large computational resources. These are are very taxing requirements placed on the researchers, and often limit the scale of the investigation quite significantly. We introduce the Swift virtual application infrastructure and the SwiftScript workflow lan-guage as the means to enable the researchers to set up and manage large experiments that need to execute on distributed resources, such as, for instance, academic Grids. We propose a computation model where various components of the experiment are distributed across com-putational resources, and the researcher expresses in SwiftScript the experiment logic through input-output (file) dependencies. We present the features of the Swift infrastructure by describing them in relation with a successful ongoing project that is being conducted by researchers from the Economics Depart-ment at the University of Chicago. The obvious benefits (such as significant speedup and reduced experiment management tasks) in a “(computationally) heavyweight ” social science such as Economics suggest the fitness of SwiftScript for all the other research domains in social sciences.