SC 2024

   FEATURED: The Art of HPC   

Undergrad Researcher Simulates Red Blood Cells Flowing Through a Microaneurysm Using High-Performance Computing

Suzan Manasreh is a 4th-year computer science major studying large-scale computer simulation with Spencer Bryngelson, assistant professor in Computational Science and Engineering.  

Last summer, Manasreh worked on maintaining a large Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulator to support new types of biophysics simulations. The simulator was called RBC3D and was used to simulate blood cells flowing through vessel walls.

“The project required significant amounts of interdisciplinary knowledge across math, physics, computing, graphics, and even anatomy,” says Manasreh.

To illustrate this, she says that all the simulation objects were geometrically defined, so many parts of the algorithm were similar to computer graphics applications. Interactions between particles in the simulation used n-body methods from computational chemistry, requiring her to understand and validate each part.

“I also had to have a good knowledge of high-performance computing topics because these simulations sometimes required 100’s of CPU cores all communicating and sending data to each other to run.

“In the end, I created a simulation of red blood cells flowing through a microaneurysm because I could pull meaningful data from this simulation such as wall shear stress on the blood vessel walls to help predict rupture rates and other similar measures.”

The undergraduate researcher submitted the simulation graphics she helped visualize and ray-trace with Paraview and OSPray to SC24’s Art of HPC contest, which will be displayed at the conference at the Georgia World Congress Center.