Preconditioning techniques for the bidomain equations

Abstract

In this work we discuss parallel preconditioning techniques for the bidomain equations, a non-linear system of partial differential equations which is widely used for describing electrical activity in cardiac tissue. We focus on the solution of the linear system associated with the elliptic part of the bidomain model, since it dominates computation, with the preconditioned conjugate gradient method. We compare different parallel preconditioning techniques, such as block incomplete LU, additive Schwarz and multigrid. The implementation is based on the PETSc library and we report results for a 16-node HP cluster. The results suggest the multigrid preconditioner is the best option for the bidomain equations.