A massively parallel computational electrophysiology model of the heart

M. VAZQUEZ; R. ARIS; G. HOUZEAUX; R. AUBRY; P. VILLAR; J. GARCIA-BARNES; M. BALLESTER RODEL; D. GIL; F. CARRERAS

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering

WILEY-BLACKWELL

Año: 2011 p. 1 - 17

2040-7939

This paper presents a subject-specific simulation strategy capable of using in the most efficient way high performance computational resources. The proposed strategy directly involves three different players: Computational Mechanics Scientists (CMS), Image Processing Scientists (IPS) and Medical Doctors (MD), each one mastering its own expertise area within the project. This paper describes the general integrative scheme but focusing in the CMS side, presenting a massively parallel implementation of Computational Electrophysiology (CEPh) schemes applied to cardiac tissue simulation. The paper covers different angles of the computational problem: the equations, the numerical issues, the algorithm and the parallel implementation. The proposed methodology is illustrated with numerical simulations testing all the different possibilities, ranging from small domains up to very large ones. A key issue is the almost ideal scalability not only for large and complex problems but also for medium-size meshes. The explicit formulation is particularly wellsuited for solving this highly transient problems, with very short time-scale.