Hierarchical Parallel Approach in Vascular Network Modeling - Hybrid MPI+OpenMP Implementation

This paper presents a two-level parallel algorithm of vascular network development. At the outer level, tasks (newly appeared parts of tissue) are spread over processing nodes. Each node attempts to connect/disconnect its assigned parts of tissue in all vascular trees. Communication between nodes is accomplished by a message passing paradigm. At the inner level, subtasks concerning different vascular trees (e.g. arterial and venous) within each task are parallelized by a shared address space paradigm. The solution was implemented on a computing cluster of multi-core nodes with mixed MPI+OpenMP support. The experimental results show that the algorithm provides a significant improvement in computational performance compared with a pure MPI implementation.