Section: New Software and Platforms

PROPAG

The workhorse for our applied simulation studies of the whole human heart is PROPAG, a code that has its origins at the Université de Montréal in Canada, and has been further developed by the Institute of Computational Science in Lugano, Switzerland. PROPAG is highly configurable and works with arbitrary model geometries. It runs efficiently on high-performance computing systems with many thousands of cores, including a “difficult” system such as the BlueGene/Q “Turing” at IDRIS. It is particularly useful for whole-heart studies, which typically rely on very large model sizes (in the order of ${10}^8$ elements), several different membrane models and cell types in a single simulation run, and several regionally varying parameters.

PROPAG is presently used in our group to study the relation between the substrate, complexity, and electrocardiographic features of atrial fibrillation and of cardiomyopathy-related ventricular arrhythmia, providing the efficiency and flexibility that is required to handle the complex anatomical structures that are involved.