Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MICROCARD (Numerical modeling of cardiac electrophysiology at the cellular scale)
Período documentado: 2021-04-01 hasta 2022-09-30
These models are already very sophisticated and widely used, but currently they are not powerful enough to take the heart's (2 billion!) individual cells into account. They must therefore assume that hundreds of cells are doing approximately the same thing. Due to this limitation, current models cannot reproduce the events in aging and structurally diseased hearts, in which reduced electrical coupling leads to large differences in behaviour between neigbouring cells, with possibly fatal consequences. But if we want to model the heart cell by cell, we face a mathematical problem that is ten thousand times larger, and also harder to solve. We will need larger supercomputers than those that exist today, and a lot of inventiveness to solve our problem efficiently on these future machines.
The main purpose of the MICROCARD project is to develop software that can solve this problem on future exascale supercomputers. We will develop algorithms that are tailored to the specific mathematical problem, to the size of the computations, and to the particular design of these future computers, which will probably owe most of their compute power to ultra-parallel computing elements such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
In addition, MICROCARD will develop the geometrical models of cardiac tissue that it needs to perform simulations, as well as the software needed to create these enormously large and complex models. For this purpose MICROCARD analyses large microscopy datasets provided by others.
Finally, we will use the code that we develop to investigate cardiac arrhythmia, in collaboration with cardiologists and physiologists.
In addition we worked on the interpretation of imaging data to construct tissue geometries, and we developed a code that can produce artificial geometries that are much larger than would be possible with microscope images.
We further worked on alternative numerical approaches to the mathematical problem, methods to distribute computational work on millions of processors, and strategies to reduce the energy consumption of our code.
The project has supported the publication of 8 journal papers so far, and as many presentations at scientific conferences. We have also participated in events aimed at a larger audience. We regularly post news about our project on our website and on social media.
Currently there is only one working exascale computer in the world. Using these extremely powerful machines will be difficult, especially for end users who are not experts in the intricacies of these machines. The MICROCARD project will help one important application, simulation of the heart, to benefit from these machines. We expect that this will also help related fields, such as brain research, to make better use of future exascale supercomputers, and we hope that these will be examples to the entire medical field.