One of the current challenges MIKELANGELO project focuses on is how the use of cloud-based HPC applications can help develop more accurate and longer lasting implants to replace damaged human body parts, as part of the Cancellous Bone Simulation use case. With each step forward in MIKELANGELO, greater flexibility of running the interactive real-time simulations is expected to help assist surgery, detect problems with implants and improve the production process of implants.
Biomechanical research relies increasingly on simulations to develop more accurate and longer lasting implants to replace damaged human body parts. The positioning and geometry of these implants can be vastly improved by knowledge of the bone density which can be precisely calculated with the help of cancellous bone software. Cancellous bone software is a high performance application that is developed for HPC centers like the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, HLRS, and can run on several thousands of compute nodes and scales accordingly. It calculates the density of the cancellous bone (also known as trabecular or spongy bones) to develop better fitting bone implants.
The MIKELANGELO project addresses the problem of developing such a highly optimized HPC application software with the help of abstraction layers, by designing a new hypervisor and a lightweight guest operating system. Also, it tries to optimize the work-flow of HPC centers for the provisioning of new applications, especially if they have conflicting requirements regarding the current set up.
A detailed use case and architecture analysis is available at MIKELANGELO’s official website: http://www.mikelangelo-project.eu/deliverables/
MIKELANGELO aims to improve the responsiveness, agility and security of the virtual infrastructure, continuously testing and validating their progress with use cases – lightweight aircraft design, use in medicine (implant production), big data software and cloud bursting. Funded by the European Union’s flagship research program and innovation program Horizon 2020 and coordinated by XLAB, it involves a consortium of partners with research and technical expertise in Cloud and virtualized environments from Europe and worldwide; Huawei, IBM, Intel, Cloudius**,** HLRS, GWDG, Ben Gurion University and Pipistrel.
