Project MICROCARD

MICROCARD is a European research project to build software that can simulate cardiac electrophysiology using heart models with sub-cellular resolution, on future exascale supercomputers. Such models will give us unprecedented abilities to study arrhythmia mechanisms in damaged heart muscle but their construction is technically challenging. We take on this challenge with an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers from both academia and industry. Cardiac arrhythmia are among are the most frequent causes of death worldwide. To better understand these arrhythmia we need numerical models that can give insight in the complex electric phenomena underneath. These models are already very sophisticated but not yet powerful enough to take the heart's individual cells into account. They must therefore assume that hundreds of cells are doing the same thing. Thus, current models cannot represent the events in aging and structurally diseased hearts, in which reduced electrical coupling leads to large differences in behaviour between neigbouring cells. The purpose of MICROCARD is to develop software that can simulate the heart cell by cell. These simulations will be 10,000 times larger than current models and will require exascale supercomputers. We will develop algorithms that are tailored to the specific mathematical problem, to the size of the computations, and to the particular design of these future computers, which will owe most of their compute power to ultra-parallel computing elements such as Graphics Processing Units. This project has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking EuroHPC (JU) under grant agreement No 955495. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Norway, and Switzerland.