Agrupando dados e kernels de um simulador cardíaco em um ambiente multi-GPU

Abstract

Computational modeling is a useful tool to study many distinct and complex phenomena, such as to describe the electrical and mechanical behavior of the heart, under normal and pathological conditions. The high complexity of the associated biophysical processes translates into complex mathematical and computational models. This, in turn, translates to cardiac simulators that demand a lot of computational power to be executed. Therefore, most of the state-of-the-art cardiac simulators are implemented to run in parallel architectures. In this work a new coalesced data and kernel scheme is evaluated. Its objective is to reduce the execution costs of cardiac simulations that run on multi-GPU environments. The new scheme was tested for an important part of the simulator, the solution of the systems of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). The results have shown that the proposed scheme is very effective. The execution time to solve the systems of ODEs on the multi-GPU environment was reduced by half, when compared to a scheme that does not implemented the proposed data and kernel coalescing. As a result, the total execution time of cardiac simulations was 25% faster.