Supercomputing can have a profound impact worldwide, particularly in health research. Whether it’s cancer diagnostic assistance, prescription drug advancements or the very DNA of human life, steps forward often begin with a narrow focus, shining the spotlight inward before showcasing it on the societal stage.

Z. Leonardo Liu, an assistant professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at Florida State University, has focused much of his young career in that way, researching the flow of suspended particles such as red blood cells. His most recent findings indicate a potential breakthrough in how these cells regulate blood clotting in the human body.

“Our findings show that red blood cells, once thought of merely as passive carriers of oxygen, also play an active role in regulating these ‘tiny switches’ that control blood clotting through intricate fluid-mechanical forces,” Liu said.

Since 2010, Liu has utilized multiple high-performance computing systems in his exploration through allocations supported by U.S. National Science Foundation-funded programs TeraGrid, XSEDE and now ACCESS. Stampede3 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) provided the needed supercomputing power that enabled Liu and his team to study how the flow of circulating blood affects clotting at the molecular and cellular levels.

“Replicating these computationally intensive, particle-based simulations on local desktop platforms would have cost years to obtain useful data,” Liu said. “ACCESS provided the massive parallelization necessary to couple millions of Lagrangian points (cells and proteins) with Eulerian fluid solvers. This allowed us to resolve the fine temporal scales needed to capture split-second molecular activation events that standard computing resources cannot handle.”

You can read more about this story here: Supercomputing Powers Breakthrough Blood-clot Research.

Resource Provider Institution(s): Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
Resources Used: Stampede3
Affiliations: Florida State University
Funding Agency: NSF 
Grant or Allocation Number(s): CHM240002

The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.