The human body contains approximately 20 billion individual blood vessels that deliver nutrients and oxygen to tissues. While blood flow is a well-developed field of research, no previous studies have calculated the blood flow rates through more than 5 million connected vessels. The goal of this study was to test if it is computationally feasible to calculate the blood flow rates through a vasculature equal in size to that of the human body. We designed and implemented a two-step algorithm to calculate the blood flow rates using principles of steady-state fluid dynamics. Steady-state fluid dynamics is an accurate approximation for the microvascular and venous structures in the human body. To determine the computational feasibility, we measured and evaluated the execution time, scalability, and memory usage to quantify the computational requirements. We demonstrated that it is computationally feasible to calculate the blood flow rate through 17 billion vessels in 6.5 hours using 256 compute nodes. The computational modeling of blood flow rate in entire organisms may find application in research on drug delivery, treatment of cancer metastases, and modulation of physiological performance.

中文翻译：

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计算通过整个人体脉管系统的稳态血流量的计算可行性

人体包含大约 200 亿条单独的血管，为组织输送营养和氧气。虽然血流是一个成熟的研究领域，但之前没有研究计算过超过 500 万个连接血管的血流率。这项研究的目的是测试计算通过与人体大小相等的脉管系统的血流量在计算上是否可行。我们设计并实施了一个两步算法来使用稳态流体动力学原理计算血流量。稳态流体动力学是对人体微血管和静脉结构的准确近似。为了确定计算可行性，我们测量并评估了执行时间、可扩展性、和内存使用量来量化计算需求。我们证明了使用 256 个计算节点在 6.5 小时内计算通过 170 亿条血管的血流量在计算上是可行的。整个生物体中血流速率的计算模型可用于药物输送、癌症转移治疗和生理机能调节的研究。