NVIDIA and Barcelona Supercomputing Center have presented a real-time interactive visualisation of a cardiac computational model that shows the potential of HPC-based simulation codes and GPU-accelerated clusters to simulate the human cardiovascular system.
At the NVIDIA GTC17 conference in San Jose (CA, US), BSC and NVIDIA bring together Alya simulation code and NVIDIA IndeX scalable software to implement an in-situ visualisation solution for of electro mechanical simulations of the BSC cardiac computational model. While Alya simulates the electromechanical cardiac propagation, NVIDIA IndeX is used for an immediate in-situ visualisation. The in-situ visualisation allows researchers to interact with the data on the fly giving a better insight into the simulations.
Alya is an HPC-based multiphysics simulation suite developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which is the core component of a cardiac computational model. In this model, BSC simulates the electromechanical propagation through the heart, which in turn contracts the cardiac muscle, which in turn pumps the blood in and out of both ventricles and atria.
The NVIDIA IndeX scalable software solution for scientific visualisation can make use of the tremendous computing capabilities GPU-accelerated clusters and HPC systems feature today. NVIDIA IndeX’s scalability enables real-time high-quality rendering of large-scale data at any dataset resolution and combines this with novel in-situ technologies.
With this joint solution BSC and NVIDIA are getting closer to a real Computational Human, a virtual lab capable of simulating and display a whole human thanks to HPC and In-Situ Visualisation.
The ability to simulate these large-scale complex problems combined with a fast visual inspection of the massive computational data produced in an interactive environment opens a vast range of possibilities for biomedical research. Among them, it enables the design of optimised medical devices, it accelerates the way towards better-personalised drugs or it allows to explore new healing therapies. All of these comes together with a strong decrease in time, money and animal testing. Thanks to computational power, the future of medicine becomes its present and science fiction becomes science.
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is the national supercomputing centre in Spain. BSC specialises in High Performance Computing (HPC) and its mission is two-fold: to provide infrastructure and supercomputing services to European scientists, and to generate knowledge and technology to transfer to business and society.
BSC is a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence and a first level hosting member of the European research infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). BSC also manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES).
BSC is a consortium formed by the Mministry of Economy, Industry and Knowledge of the Spanish Government, the Business and Knowledge Department of the Catalan Government and the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech
