Decomposition Solvers in Computational Electrocardiology
Staff - Faculty of Informatics
Start date: 17 December 2009
End date: 18 December 2009
The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Luca Pavarino
DATE: Thursday, December 17th, 2009
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15.30
ABSTRACT:
Research on electrophysiology of the heart has progressed greatly in the last decades, producing a vast body of knowledge ranging from microscopic description of cellular membrane ion channels to macroscopic anisotropic propagation of excitation and repolarization fronts in the whole heart. Multiscale models have proven very useful in the study of these complex phenomena, progressively including more detailed features of each component in more models that couple parabolic systems of nonlinear reaction- diffusion equations with stiff systems of several ordinary differential equations. Numerical integration is, therefore, a challenging large-scale computation, requiring parallel solvers and distributed architectures. We review some recent advances in numerical parallel solution of these cardiac reaction-diffusion models, focusing, in particular, on scalability of domain decomposition iterative solvers that belong to the family of multilevel additive Schwarz preconditioners. Numerical results obtained with the PETSc library on Linux Clusters confirm the scalability and optimality of the proposed solvers, for large-scale simulations of a complete cardiac cycle.
BIO:
Luca F. Pavarino is a professor of Numerical Analysis at the University of Milano, Italy. He graduated from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, USA, in 1992. After spending two postdoctoral years at the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics of Rice University, Houston, USA, he became assistant professor at the University of Pavia, Italy in 1994 and then professor at the University of Milano in 1998.
His research activity has focused on domain decomposition methods for elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations discretized with finite or spectral elements, in particular on their construction, analysis and parallel implementation on distributed memory parallel computers.
He has applied these parallel numerical methods to problems in computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, computational electrocardiology.
HOST: Prof. Rolf Krause
