The Cardioid code divides the heart into a large number of manageable pieces, or subdomains. The development team used two approaches, called Voronoi (left) and grid (right), to break the enormous computing challenge into much smaller individual tasks.

A November 14 article in ISGTW (The International Science Grid this Week) highlighted recent work carried out on the Sequoia Supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), California. As of November 2012, Sequoia is the second most powerful supercomputer on Earth, with a peak theoretical throughput of 16.32 petaflops (quadrillions of floating operating points) per second.

The simulation was the fastest and most detailed model of a beating human heart yet – representing the electrophysiological activity within and among a total of 370 million cells. The story elaborates that “Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the IBM Research, US, used a software code called Cardioid to simulate electrophysiological activity – or electrical connections — within and among cells in a human heart at a resolution of an unprecedented scale – a spatial resolution of a heart cell, which is about 0.1 millimeters long.”

Dr. Raimond Winslow, Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine was quoted saying “The implementation of the heart model on Sequoia is a major breakthrough in all the application areas of computational medicine, and has implications for all model-based methods for personalized care at the point of treatment,”. John Jeremy Rice, Ph.D., who was an author on the SC12 Presentation, “Toward Real-Time Modeling of Human Heart Ventricles at Cellular Resolution: Simulation of Drug-Induced Arrhythmias” completed his PhD research in Dr. Winslow’s laboratory.