Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Laval University,
Quebec City, Canada | Institute of Computer Science, University of Basel,
Switzerland | Orthopaedic Research Laboratory, Division of
Orthopaedic Surgery, McGill University, Montreal, Canada | Institute of Computer Science and Applied
Mathematics, University of Berne, Switzerland
Abstract: Research in scientitic programming enables us to realize more and
more complex applications, and on the other hand, application-driven demands on
computing methods and power are continuously growing. Therefore,
interdisciplinary approaches become more widely used. The interdisciplinary
SPINET project presented in this article applies modern scientific computing
tools to biomechanical simulations: parallel computing and symbolic and modern
functional programming. The target application is the human spine. Simulations
of the spine help us to investigate and better understand the mechanisms of
back pain and spinal injury. Two approaches have been used: the
first uses the finite element method for high-performance simulations of static
biomechanical models, and the second generates a simulation developmenttool for
experimenting with different dynamic models. A finite element program for
static analysis has been parallelized for the MUSIC machine. To solve the
sparse system of linear equations, a conjugate gradient solver (iterative
method) and a frontal solver (direct method) have been implemented. The
preprocessor required for the frontal solver is written in the modern
functional programming language SML, the solver itself in C, thus exploiting
the characteristic advantages of both functional and imperative
programming. The speedup analysis of both solvers show very
satisfactory results for this irregular problem. A mixed symbolic-numeric
environment for rigid body system simulations is presented. It
automatically generates C code from a problem specification expressed by the
Lagrange formalism using Maple.
