GPU-Based Simulation of 3D Blood Flow in Abdominal Aorta Using OpenFoam

The simulation of blood flow in the cardiac system has the potential
to become an attractive diagnostic tool for many cardiovascular
diseases, such as in the case of aneurysm. This potential could be
reached if the simulations were to be completed in hours rather
than days and without resorting to the use of expensive
supercomputers. Therefore we have investigated a possibility of
accelerating medical computation fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using graphics processing units (GPUs). Our results for the 3D blood flow in
the human abdominal aorta show that by transferring only a part of the
computations (linear system solvers) to the GPU, it is possible
to make the typical CFD simulations three to four times faster
depending on the CFD model being used. Since these simulations were
performed on widely available GPUs that had been designed as
mass-market PC extension cards, our results suggest that porting
larger parts of CFD to GPUs could really bring the technology into hospitals.