In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest towards the understanding of

circulation of blood, from capillaries to large systems of vessels. Blood and the vascular system constitute a multi-faceted environment composed of several physical layers and resulting in a complex phenomenology.  Understanding blood rheology within the cardiovascular system has fundamental implications in the biomedical sciences. As well documented, atherosclerosis is the most common disease that affects the arterial blood vessels and coronary heart disease is the most common cause of mortality in western countries.

Nowadays, the simulation of blood flow in complex systems of vessels, such as coronary or cranial arteries, is becoming a standard achievement in several computational groups. However, a correct understanding of blood flows

still requires the inclusion of vascular deformability, physiologically correct inflow and outflow conditions, and physiologically motivated models to emulate the global nature of the cardiovascular system.       

On the other hand, more and more the community is shifting its attention towards the behavior of blood emerging  from its corpuscolar nature, such as in the formation of thrombi, in proximity of stents or aneurisms, or in relation to atherogenesis and the formation and evolution of plaques.

This intention reflects on the need for sophisticated simulation methods that enable the simulation of blood plasma and suspended bodies, possibly allowing for internal deformation. 

Moreover, in order to handle large data sets from real patients and relate the simulation data to the history  of a given disease, there is growing demand for high performance computing. To this purpose, some groups involved in hemodynamics focus many of their efforts in developing highly efficient softwares, on conventional parallel CPUs or accelerator-based hardware.