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In the quest to discover how the mechanisms of disease work, researchers at the Universite de Montreal (UdM) have run the largest mathematical simulation of a heart ever assembled -- a 2 billion element model -- on a high-performance computing system from SGI (Nasdaq: SGIC). The new UdM model is up to 1,000 times more detailed than previous models, enabling new scientific discoveries that would never be possible via observation alone. Until recently, the largest heart models in the world had at most a few million elements. Over the last nine months, Dr. Mark Potse and Dr Alain Vinet, both affiliated with the Research Center of Sacre-Coeur Hospital and the Biomedical Engineering department at UdM, began running 100 to 120 million-point models as part of their heart disease research on an SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 system, believed to be the largest shared memory computing system in Canada. More