Design of a fem computation engine for real-time laparoscopic surgery simulation

We present the design of a computation engine for a real-time laparoscopic surgery simulator. Since this simula-tor requires realistic real-time and real-world behaviour, a physically correct model of the biological system has to be used, which leads to FEM modeling of the organs. The re-quirements imposed by dynamic FEM calculations cannot be met with state of the art parallel computers, since they are not optimized for the special needs of the underlying al-gorithm. Based on these requirements, we are designing a parallel processing engine that optimally supports commu-nicational and computational needs. To support concurrent development of soft- and hardware, we have developed a simulator for the target hardware which allows continuous monitoring of the overall system performance.