Flexible composition and execution of high performance, high fidelity multiscale biomedical simulations

Interface Focus. 2013 Apr 6;3(2):20120087. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2012.0087.

Abstract

Multiscale simulations are essential in the biomedical domain to accurately model human physiology. We present a modular approach for designing, constructing and executing multiscale simulations on a wide range of resources, from laptops to petascale supercomputers, including combinations of these. Our work features two multiscale applications, in-stent restenosis and cerebrovascular bloodflow, which combine multiple existing single-scale applications to create a multiscale simulation. These applications can be efficiently coupled, deployed and executed on computers up to the largest (peta) scale, incurring a coupling overhead of 1-10% of the total execution time.

Keywords: blood flow; cerebrovascular bloodflow; distributed computing; high performance computing; in-stent restenosis; multiscale modelling.