GPU accelerated solver for nonlinear reaction-diffusion systems. Application to the electrophysiology problem

Solving the electric activity of the heart possess a big challenge, not only because of the structural complexities inherent to the heart tissue, but also because of the complex electric behaviour of the cardiac cells. The multi-scale nature of the electrophysiology problem makes difficult its numerical solution, requiring temporal and spatial resolutions of 0.1 ms and 0.2 mm respectively for accurate simulations, leading to models with millions degrees of freedom that need to be solved for thousand time steps. Solution of this problem requires the use of algorithms with higher level of parallelism in multi-core platforms. In this regard the newer programmable graphic processing units (GPU) has become a valid alternative due to their tremendous computational horsepower. This paper presents results obtained with a novel electrophysiology simulation software entirely developed in Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The software implements fully explicit and semi-implicit solvers for the monodomain model, using operator splitting. Performance is compared with classical multi-core MPI based solvers operating on dedicated high-performance computer clusters. Results obtained with the GPU based solver show enormous potential for this technology with accelerations over 50× for three-dimensional problems.