Parallel simulation of apoptotic receptor-clustering on GPGPU many-core architectures

Apoptosis, the programmed cell death, is a physiological process that handles the removal of unwanted or damaged cells in living organisms. The process itself is initiated by signaling through tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptors and ligands, which form clusters on the cell membrane. The exact function of this process is not yet fully understood and currently subject of basic research. Different mathematical models have been developed to describe and simulate the apoptotic receptor-clustering. In this interdisciplinary work, a previously introduced model of the apoptotic receptor-clustering has been extended by a new receptor type to allow a more precise description and simulation of the signaling process. Due to the high computational requirements of the model, an efficient algorithmic mapping to a modern many-core GPGPU architecture has been developed. Such architectures enable high-performance computing (HPC) simulation tasks on the desktop at low costs. The developed mapping reduces average simulation times from months to days (peak speedup of 256x), allowing the productive use of the model in research.