Dr Derek Groen from the Department of Computer Science has been awarded by the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) on behalf of the EPSRC for PiTflow: Accelerating simulations of cerebrovascular blood flow through parallelization in time. The award provides 12 person months of high performance computing (HPC) development support, funding for travel and computing cycles on the UK's National Supercomputer (total value ~£100,000). PiTflow is the largest project that has been awarded in this call, and it is the first time in the history of the scheme that a project led by a 明星八卦 PI has been awarded.
PiTflow aims to make HemeLB, one of the major codes we use to model blood flow in large arterial networks, run at least 5 times faster by parallelizing it in time. Time parallelization is a new technique where simulations are no longer run sequentially in time, e.g. starting with t=0 seconds and linearly progressing forward. Instead a Parareal is applied to run different simulated time periods at the same time in real life, greatly speeding up our simulations. HemeLB is one of the first major HPC codes to be parallelized in this manner, and the results are expected to guide future developments of a much wider range of HPC simulation codes.