Abstract
We study the electrical field in the human body, generated by the ventricular muscle, by means of numerical simulations. The involved mathematical model consists of two partial differential equations (PDEs) that are also coupled with a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Following the strategy of operator-splitting, we have devised an efficient numerical algorithm that carries out a simulation step-wise in time. At every time level, the ODE system is solved before a parabolic PDE, and then an elliptic PDE. The main focus of this paper is on the transformation of an existing sequential simulator into a parallel simulator that runs on multiprocessor platforms. Two important numerical ingredients used in the resulting parallel simulator are overlapping domain decomposition and multigrid, which together ensure good numerical efficiency. We also explain how object-oriented programming techniques enable the software parallelization in a simple and structured manner. In addition, we study the performance of the parallel simulator on different multiprocessor platforms.
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Cai, X., Lines, G.T. (2002). Enabling Numerical and Software Technologies for Studying the Electrical Activity in Human Heart. In: Fagerholm, J., Haataja, J., Järvinen, J., Lyly, M., Råback, P., Savolainen, V. (eds) Applied Parallel Computing. PARA 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2367. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48051-X_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48051-X_1
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