Super computer simulates human heart

Sequoia, currently the world's most powerful supercomputer, is built to maintain nuclear weapons. Recently, however, researchers have used it to replicate a breakthrough model, which is the human heart.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), famous for its high-performance computing projects, programmed the Sequoia computer while it was in beta.

Supercomputers is a very competitive field, but up to this point, Sequoia is the world champion, with over 1.5 million computer cores performing over 20 quintillion (10 caps 18) operations / orders. per second, allowing researchers to model human heart with extremely high accuracy.

Heart model who is simulated Sequoia computer

NBC News quoted LLNL Art Mirin's computer science expert as saying that their code work is a great opportunity to show Sequoia's ability.

The computer divides the heart into thousands of small digital pieces, each containing algorithms that receive and send data to other pieces. Although the model only simulates the electronic activity of the heart, their interaction needs a huge amount of calculations.

The best heart simulation ever made is to combine pieces about 0.2mm across, and take up to 45 minutes to mimic a beat.

With the new software called Cardioid running on the Sequoia supercomputer, the simulation is made more accurate (with pieces 0.1mm across, the size of a real heart cell), but also hundreds of times faster: every 'virtual' heartbeat now takes only 10 seconds to perform.

Such a strong performance improvement allows researchers to implement many works, such as testing for arrhythmias.