Application of Parallel Processing to the Simulation of Heart Mechanics

Simulations of the mechanics of the left ventricle of the heart with fluid-structure interaction benefit greatly from the parallel processing power of a high performance computing cluster, such as HPCVL. The objective of this paper is to describe the computational requirements for our simulations. Results of parallelization studies show that, as expected, increasing the number of threads per job reduces the total wall clock time for the simulations. Further, the speed-up factor increases with increasing problem size. Comparative simulations with different computational meshes and time steps show that our numerical solutions are nearly independent of the mesh density in the solid wall (myocardium) and the time step duration. The results of these tests allow our simulations to continue with the confidence that we are optimizing our computational resources while minimizing errors due to choices in spatial or temporal resolution.