MicroCard: Numerical modeling of cardiac electrophysiology at the cellular scale

A groundbreaking approach to studying cardiac electrophysiology is to model the heart cell by cell, which will lead to a mathematical problem that is 10,000 times larger, and also harder to solve. We will need larger supercomputers than those that exist today, and a lot of inventiveness to compute efficiently on these future machines.

The purpose of the MICROCARD project is to develop a software code that will be able to solve this problem on future "exascale" supercomputers. We will develop algorithms that are tailored to the specific mathematical problem, to the size of the computations, and to the particular design of these future computers, which will probably owe most of their computing power to ultra-parallel computing elements such as Graphics Processing Units. We will not content ourselves with a "proof of concept", but will use the code that we develop to solve real-life problems in cardiology. Therefore the project includes computer experts, mathematicians, and biomedical engineers, and collaborates with cardiologists and physiologists.

The code will be adaptable to similar biological systems such as nerves, and some components will be reusable in an even wider range of applications.

Funding source

50% EU (through EuroHPC), and 50% from the Research Council of Norway 

Partners

• University of Bordeaux (France)
• University of Strasbourg (France)
• Inria (France)
• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany)
• Zuse Institute Berlin (Germany)
• University of Pavia (Italy), Università Della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)
• Megware (Germany)
• Orobix (Italy)
• NumeriCor (Austria) 

Project coordinator:

• Mark Potse (Univ. Bordeaux/Inria),
• Simulal contact person: Xing Cai

Project website at EU: http://www.microcard.eu