Performance comparison of parallel geometric and algebraic multigrid preconditioners for the bidomain equations

The purpose of this paper is to discuss parallel preconditioning techniques to solve the elliptic portion (since it dominates computation) of the bidomain model, a non-linear system of partial differential equations that is widely used for describing electrical activity in the heart. Specifically, we assessed the performance of parallel multigrid preconditioners for a conjugate gradient solver. We compared two different approaches: the Geometric and Algebraic Multigrid Methods. The implementation is based on the PETSc library and we reported results for a 6-node Athlon 64 cluster. The results suggest that the algebraic multigrid preconditioner performs better than the geometric multigrid method for the cardiac bidomain equations.