Mirheo: High-performance mesoscale simulations for microfluidics

The transport and manipulation of particles and cells in microfluidic devices has become a core methodology in domains ranging from molecular biology to manufacturing and drug design. The design and operation of such devices can benefit from simulations that resolve flow-structure interactions at sub-micron resolution. We present a computational tool for large scale, efficient and high throughput mesoscale simulations of fluids and deformable objects at complex microscale geometries. The code employs dissipative particle dynamics for the description of the flow coupled with visco-elastic membrane model for red blood cells and can also handle rigid bodies and complex geometries. The software (Mirheo) is deployed on hybrid GPU/CPU architectures exhibiting unprecedented time-to-solution performance and excellent weak and strong scaling for a number of benchmark problems. Mirheo exploits the capabilities of GPU clusters, leading to speedup of up to 10X in terms of time to solution as compared to state-of-the-art software packages and reaches 90%–99% weak scaling efficiency on 512 nodes of the Piz Daint supercomputer. The software Mirheo relies on a Python interface to facilitate the solution and analysis of complex problems. Mirheo is an open source, potent computational tool that can greatly assist studies of microfluidics.