SC Conference - Activity Details

Luca Pavarino  (Universita di Milano)

Scalable Algorithms and Applications

Thursday,  03:30PM - 04:15PM

Room PB252

Research on electrophysiology of the heart has progressed greatly in the last decades, producing a vast body of knowledge ranging from microscopic description of cellular membrane ion channels to macroscopic anisotropic propagation of excitation and repolarization fronts in the whole heart. Multiscale models have proven very useful in the study of these complex phenomena, progressively including more detailed features of each component in more models that couple parabolic systems of nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations with stiff systems of several ordinary differential equations. Numerical integration is, therefore, a challenging large-scale computation, requiring parallel solvers and distributed architectures. We review some recent advances in numerical parallel solution of these cardiac reaction-diffusion models, focusing, in particular, on scalability of domain decomposition iterative solvers that belong to the family of multilevel additive Schwarz preconditioners. Numerical results obtained with the PETSc library on Linux Clusters confirm the scalability and optimality of the proposed solvers, for large-scale simulations of a complete cardiac cycle.