Scalable Cardiac Electro-Mechanical Solvers and Reentry Dynamics

Abstract

We present a scalable solver for the three-dimensional cardiac electro-mechanical coupling (EMC) model, which represents, currently, the most complete mathematical description of the interplay between the electrical and mechanical phenomena occurring during a heartbeat. The most computational demanding parts of the EMC model are: the electrical current flow model of the cardiac tissue, called Bidomain model, consisting of two non-linear partial differential equations of reaction-diffusion type; the quasi-static finite elasticity model for the deformation of the cardiac tissue. Our finite element parallel solver is based on: Block Jacobi and Multilevel Additive Schwarz preconditioners for the solution of the linear systems deriving from the discretization of the Bidomain equations; Newton-Krylov-Algebraic-Multigrid or Newton-Krylov-BDDC algorithms for the solution of the non-linear algebraic system deriving from the discretization of the finite elasticity equations. Three-dimensional numerical test on two linux clusters show the effectiveness and scalability of the EMC solver in simulating both physiological and pathological cardiac dynamics.