NERSC Initiative for Scientific Exploration (NISE) 2009 Awards

Health Application for Research into Multicore Architectures

Brian Van Straalen, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Sponsoring NERSC Project: Health Application for ParLab research into Multicore architectures (m1058), Principal Investigator: Brian Van Straalen, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The HealthApp is a part of the ParLab. It is an attempt to do real-time cerebral blood flow modeling to aid in the treatment of stroke. With 800,000 strokes per year in the U.S. and 150,000 deaths per year, strokes are the third leading cause of mortality. The goal is to develop rapid computational tools to help surgeons and radiologists interpret three-dimensional medical images obtained from computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) for surgical planning and critical decision-making to improve patient care, reduce healthcare costs and save lives. These tools will build upon the successful development of a highly parallel program (2004 Gordon Bell Prize) for virtual strength testing of bones, clinical diagnosis and assessment of osteoporosis, and orthopedic surgical planning.

The HealthApp is a fluid-structures interaction physics problem. The moving boundary fluids problem is being developed in Chombo. The solid mechanics problem is being handled in Prometheus (a highly parallel version of the Athena solid modeling package from UCB). Both codes will be augmented to run in a multicore parallel hybrid mode as part of this work.