World's biggest heart model simulated at Université de Mon...( Montreal January 18 2008 Researcher...)

Montreal, January 18, 2008 Researchers from the Universit de Montral have used a supercomputer to conduct the largest-ever mathematical simulation of the electrical activity of a human heart a 2 billion element model to provide new insight into cardiac and other illnesses. Until recently, the worlds largest simulated hearts had a few million elements at most. The UdeM simulation was up to 1,000 times more detailed than previous models and will enable new scientific discoveries that would never have been possible otherwise.

The computer on which the simulation was performed, a 768-processor SGI Altix 4700, is the largest shared-memory computing system in Canada. Operated by the Rseau qubcois de calcul de haute performance (RQCHP), it is used by hundreds of Canadian researchers. Mark Potse and Alain Vinet, of the UdeMs Institute of Biomedical Engineering, routinely use 60 to 100 of these processors to run their simulations of the human heart. In late October, Potse and Vinet had the opportunity to use the entire SGI Altix system and its1.2TB of shared memory to solve the largest, most detailed heart model ever.

Two weeks to simulate full heartbeat

The researchers simulated five milliseconds of activation in a tissue block that included some properties of a real heart, such as fibre running in different directions. The simulation solved a system of two billion equations a dozen times. The test took two hours. A full heartbeat, Potse says, would take two weeks to simulate and his team cannot claim use of the entire supercomputer for such lengths yet. The purpose of the test was to show that when the next generation supercomputers becomes available, researchers will be able to use it effectively, said Vinet. This type of model is increasingly difficult to solve when it is larger. It was far from evident that this test was going to work.

With heart disease one of the leading causes of death in the Western world, discovering
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