ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid: Petascale Algorithms for Particulate Flows

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Note: The project described in this document is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) to use TeraGrid's petascale environments for highly advanced scientific analysis and simulations that advance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research. For more, see ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid.

This project is developing a petaFLOPS-scalable computational infrastructure for the direct simulation of particulate flows, in particular the simulation of spatio-temporal dynamics of platelet aggregation.

Better understanding of microcirculation of blood and platelet rheology will impact clinical needs in thrombosis risk assessment, anti-coagulation therapy, and stroke research.

The proposed method comprises two algorithmic components:

Integral equation solvers for Stokesian flows with dynamic interfaces
Scalable fast multipole algorithms

Petaflop-scale computing power is needed to tackle this problem, because one microliter of blood contains millions of red blood cells (RBCs) and a few hundred thousand platelets. Discretizations with O (100 points/cell) and O (1000) time steps result in more than a trillion space-time unknowns. Solving problems of such size require 50K-core machines. Computational tools that achieve such scalability will enable direct numerical simulation of several microliters of blood, once million-core computing platforms are available.

For more, see award abstracts #0749162 and #0749285 on the NSF web site.