Parallel Acceleration for Modeling of Calcium Dynamics in Cardiac Myocytes
Issue title: Frontiers in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology – Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, 11–13 October 2013, Wuhan, China
Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, WI, USA | Department of Mathematics, Clarkson University, NY, USA
Note: [] The work described was supported in part by an NIH Award (Number R15HL103497) from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and by a grant from the UWM Research Growth Initiative.
Abstract: Spatial-temporal calcium dynamics due to calcium release, buffering, and re-uptaking plays a central role in studying excitation-contraction (E-C) coupling in both healthy and defected cardiac myocytes. In our previous work, partial differential equations (PDEs) had been used to simulate calcium dynamics with realistic geometries extracted from electron microscopic imaging data. However, the computational costs of such simulations are very high on a single processor. To alleviate this problem, we have accelerated the numerical simulations of calcium dynamics by using graphics processing units (GPUs). Computational performance and simulation accuracy are compared with those based on a single CPU and another popular parallel computing technique, OpenMP.
