Simulation of creeping flows and structure interaction on Terabyte size data

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness for people over the age of 60. Glaucoma damages the optic nerve, by causing abnormally high pressure in the eye. The cerebrospinal fluid pressure and composition within the optic nerve subarachnoid space are key factors in understanding the dynamics of this pathology. In particular, the trabecular meshwork, located within the iridocorneal angle, is the main pathway for drainage of aqueous humor out of the eye, and its dysfunction is responsible for the increased intraocular pressure. The trabecular meshwork has an extremely complex structure; high-end synchrotron x-ray imaging is required to capture it. Such images require Terabytes of disk space in order to be stored. Hence, supercomputing is mandatory for processing and performing simulations on such images. The goal of this project is to simulate the interaction of the cerebrospinal fluid with the subarachnoid space trabeculae and the optic nerve. Thus, we aim at designing and developing highperformance software for fluid-structure interaction capable of handling systems of equations with up to 1012 degrees of freedom. Efficient numerical simulations at such a scale are challenging and require carefully crafted methods and high-performance codes tailoring the specific application.