The In-Silico Lab-on-a-Chip: Petascale and High-Throughput Simulations of Microfluidics at Cell Resolution

D Rossinell and YH Tang and K Lykov and D Alexeev and M Bernaschi and P Hadjidoukas and M Bisson and W Joubert and C Conti and G Karniadakis and M Fatica and I Pivkin and P Koumoutsakos, PROCEEDINGS OF SC15: THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING, NETWORKING, STORAGE AND ANALYSIS (2015).

DOI: 10.1145/2807591.2807677

We present simulations of blood and cancer cell separation in complex microfluidic channels with subcellular resolution, demonstrating unprecedented time to solution, performing at 65.5% of the available 39.4 PetaInstructions/s in the 18; 688 nodes of the Titan supercomputer. These simulations outperform by one to three orders of magnitude the current state of the art in terms of numbers of simulated cells and computational elements. The computational setup emulates the conditions and the geometric complexity of microfluidic experiments and our results reproduce the experimental fi ndings. These simulations provide sub- micron resolution while accessing time scales relevant to engineering designs. We demonstrate an improvement of up to 45X over competing state-of-the-art solvers, thus establishing the frontiers of simulations by particle based methods. Our simulations rede fi ne the role of computational science for the development of microfluidics - a technology that is becoming as important to medicine as integrated circuits have been to computers.

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