Student research opportunities

Performance Tuning of the Chaste Heart Modelling Code

Project Code: CECS_652

This project is available at the following levels:
CS single semester, Honours, Summer Scholar
Please note that this project is only for undergraduate students.

Keywords:

high performance computing, performance analysis, medical simulation

Supervisor:

Dr Peter Strazdins

Outline:

Chaste is a state-of-the-art heart simulation code written in C++. It however is very computationally expensive, as high resolution meshes and small timesteps are required for accurate simulation. Even on state-of-the-art clusters, simulations may require significant run-time. A preliminary (though detailed) performance evaluation has recently been performed (see Peter to access).

Goals of this project

This project will begin with a thorough performance analysis on Chaste, identifying the computationally dominant routines and the major causes for loss of performance. It will then investigate possible areas for optimization, including improving memory re-use

Requirements/Prerequisites

Some experience in high-performance computing and computer systems is highly desirable, especially for the 12-unit project courses.

Student Gain

Chaste is of interest to the Open Petascale Libraries project, of which ANU is a participating institution.

Scholarships/travel opportunities may be available for suitably qualified Honours students.