Feasibility of Whole-Heart Electrophysiological Models with Near-Cellular Resolution

Given the opportunity to use a new cluster computer with over a quarter million compute cores we tested the strong and weak scaling of a monodomain reaction-diffusion model of the human ventricles with Ten Tusscher-Panfilov dynamics. Element sizes down to 25 µm and a model size up to 11 billion nodes were tested with both explicit and implicit Euler integration methods. Time steps were 0.01 ms for the implicit method and were resolution-dependent for the explicit method. We found that the weak scaling (increasing model size) was good for both methods. Depending on the model size, strong scaling (speedup at a larger number of cores) was satisfactory for the explicit method, and more limited for the implicit method. The implicit solver was generally slower; only at a resolution of 25 µm and on a relatively small number of cores it was as fast as the explicit solver. We conclude that whole-heart simulations at 25 µm resolution are technically feasible, although not practical yet on currently available systems.