Performance evaluation of a grid-based Heart Simulator

Abstract

Over the last few years, computer models have become valuable tools for the understanding of complex biological phenomena, such as the electric propagation on cardiac tissue. We have developed a Heart Simulator that models this electric propagation as a set of non-linear system of partial differential equations. Solving this problem is computationally expensive even when a parallel approach is used. Depending on how accurate is the simulation, it can take many hours or even some days to compute a single heart beat. In addition, the simulation of some cardiac diseases as well as the quantification of the cardiac response to drugs demand thousands of single-beat simulations. This would only be feasible today in a Grid, an environment that provides computational resources that are remotely available through the Internet. In this work, we evaluate our Heart Simulator on a Grid environment. The preliminary performance tests suggest that the Heart Simulator is a promising tool and the computational resources of the Grid may promote the use of new and more complex cardiac simulations. © 2010 International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering.