INDUSTRY

At iGrid 2005, the fourth community-driven biennial international grid event, Sept. 26-29, at the University of California, San Diego, researchers will use TeraGrid resources to demonstrate the first-ever simulation of the human arterial tree. Brown University researchers are developing simulation of the human arterial tree in collaboration with researchers from ANL, Northern Illinois University and the University of Chicago. The human arterial tree model contains the largest 55 arteries in the human body with 27 artery bifurcations at a fine-enough resolution to capture the flow. This requires a total memory of three to seven terabytes for the finite-element model, beyond current capacity of any single supercomputing site. The simulation therefore harnesses the TeraGrid by using multiple sites simultaneously to complete a single simulation. The simulation assigns components of the arterial tree to four different supercomputers on TeraGrid, located at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, National Center for Supercomputing Applications and San Diego Supercomputer Center. These components are coupled to simulate the entire body, with visualization processing done at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. The TeraGrid, the researchers believe, is the only possible way to accommodate such a simulation with currently available resources. Collaborators in the project are Michael E. Papka of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, George Karniadakis and Steve Dong of Brown University, Nicholas T. Karonis of Northern Illinois University and Argonne National Laboratory, and Joseph A. Insley of Argonne National Laboratory. The TeraGrid, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is a partnership of people and resources that provides a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure to enable discovery in U.S. science and engineering research. Through high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates a distributed set of very-high capability computational, data management and visualization resources to make U.S. research more productive. With Science Gateway collaborations and education and mentoring programs, the TeraGrid also connects and broadens scientific communities. For more information, see its Web site.