Intel and SIMULIA Partnership
Healthcare costs represent an alarming and unsustainable share of national wealth across the world, and show no signs of slowing. In the US, they now represent over 17% of GDP and could grow to 35% by 2050. A digital revolution in healthcare is needed to bring costs under control while improving both quality of care and access in poorly served parts of the world.
For Intel, this is just part of a larger initiative for enabling a new age of life sciences and precision medicine. For Dassault Systèmes, this was addressed by honing in first on cardiovascular disease, which remains the number one cause of death worldwide, and bringing together a multidisciplinary team of experts to form the Living Heart Project. Participants from industry, academia, clinical practice, and regulatory bodies are collaborating toward a unifying technology platform that can collect and synergize diverse cardiovascular knowledge. The ultimate goal is the development of improved products and treatments that will benefit patients and save lives.
Intel joined the Living Heart Project to lend its decades of expertise in high-performance computing and related technologies to help make this groundbreaking biomedical engineering a reality. Working with partners such as SIMULIA, Intel is helping to quantify biological systems using large-scale data.
“In the future, performance improvements will be measured in the number of lives saved.” – Steve Levine, Executive Director of the Living Heart Project
The potential benefits of this transformation are profound, to cardiovascular medicine and beyond. Advances in healthcare analytics will reveal patterns that can guide precise treatment and preventive care for individuals and improve handling of public-health issues.
As part of this digital revolution, the Internet of Things will create communication between patient sensors, medical devices, and provider networks to improve efficiency and cost effectiveness; these new data flows will demand new and improved solutions. It will not be long before genomic markers will allow treatments to be tailored directly to an individual’s genetic profile, and Intel will be there with the computing foundation to support it. As Steve Levine, Executive Director of the Living Heart Project put it, “In the future, performance improvements will be measured in number of lives saved.”
Intel has helped quantify these improvements through their powerful Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family. Because the Living Heart is a sophisticated and flexible simulation of the heart it requires more powerful compute capabilities. Time is critical when designing new life-saving devices or providing patient care.
To help with its computationally intensive nature, use of the LHM benefits dramatically from the extensive optimization work through the Intel and SIMULIA partnership to accelerate the underlying Abaqus software. In particular, the solution takes advantage of Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2.0, which doubles the number of floating-point operations per cycle compared to the first generation of the technology.
The combination of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family and SIMULIA Abaqus software has shown a speedup of approximately 1.37x compared to the previous processor generation (see graph). While the workload used to generate this particular result is not the Living Heart, it illustrates the value of ongoing hardware advances and software optimizations to this important work. Performance enhancements to the LHM enable simulations based on richer data sets to be conducted in less time and more cost effectively. Looking ahead, researchers are now turning their attention to simulating cardiac disease states and complete digital testing of new and more-effective treatments.
Intel and SIMULIA continue to work together to revolutionize medicine to transform the world within us more rapidly than ever thought possible.
