Jan. 23, 2008 | To get a better understanding how the mechanisms of certain diseases work in order to develop better drugs and better treatments, researchers at the Université de Montréal (UdM) have run a two billion element model of the heart, which they claim is the largest mathematical simulation of a heart ever assembled.

The model seeks to discover the electrical triggers and mechanisms of the various kinds of heart disease. Once the disease mechanisms are fully understood, researchers will then be able to devise the best drug or cure — surgical or otherwise.

Over the last year, Dr. Mark Potse and Dr Alain Vinet, both affiliated with the Research Center of Sacré-Cœur Hospital and the Biomedical Engineering department at UdM, began running 100 to 120 million point models on an SGI Altix 4700 system, which is shared by many researchers across Canada. In those simulations, they used 60 of the 768 Intel Itanium 2 processors within the system.

More recently, the pair had the chance to use the entire SGI Altix system and its 1.2 TB of shared memory. This allowed them to run their two billion element custom electrocardiography (ECG) code to simulate the largest, most detailed heart model ever.

The run simulated 5 milliseconds of activation in a tissue block that included some properties of a real heart. The run took two hours, which Potse says is a short time for this type of simulation. A full heartbeat would take two weeks of compute time on the system, and researchers cannot do this since the system is shared.

However, the test gave Poste and Vinet insight into ways to improve the model. “This was a test to see if the simulation works and to determine that, if we have a much bigger machine, [would] our software be able to run more efficiently,” said Potse. “This capability is really for the future when we can use this size of machine on a regular basis.”

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This article first appeared in Bio-IT World’s Inside IT newsletter. Click here for a free subscription to Inside IT.