Today, right now, research is taking place to learn just what triggers fibrillation - a condition where the heart can begin beating up to 600 times a minute - with the hope that perhaps such events can be shut down before they even get started.
One such research program is taking place at the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB), where the effects of electrical fields on human heart tissue are observed not in a gory lab, but rather in the confines of a Beowulf cluster of servers running Linux. http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4243/1/