Scalable Simulation of Realistic Volume Fraction Red Blood Cell Flows through Vascular Networks

Authors: Libin Lu (New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences), Matthew J. Morse (New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences), Abtin Rahimian (University of Colorado), Georg Stadler (New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences), Denis Zorin (New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences)

Abstract: High-fidelity blood flow simulations are a key step toward better understanding biophysical phenomena at the microscale, such as vasodilation, vasoconstriction, and overall vascular resistance. To this end, we present a fast scalable platform for the simulation of red blood cell (RBC) flows through complex capillaries by modeling the physical system as a viscous fluid with immersed deformable particles. We describe a parallel boundary integral equation solver for general elliptic partial differential equations, which we apply to Stokes flow through blood vessels. We also detail a parallel collision avoiding algorithm to ensure RBCs and the blood vessel remain contact-free. We have scaled our code on Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center up to 34,816 cores. Our largest simulation enforces a contact-free state between four billion surface elements and solves for three billion degrees of freedom on one million RBCs and a blood vessel composed from two million patches.


Presentation: file


Back to Technical Papers Archive Listing