A Parallel Modelling Algorithm for Simulating Calcium Release in Cells

Using a spatially discretised model structure to represent the behaviour of calcium release sites in a cell, this paper presents a parallel solution algorithm which treats each release site as an independent sub-system, and manages inter-site data communication on a global timestep. When compared to the equivalent single-thread solution algorithm, the parallel method features a negligible reduction in accuracy, and improves computation time scaling from a quadratic, O(n2) to a linear, O(n), with respect to the number of release sites, n, in the model.