Terabytes for the Blue Brain project
European neuroscientists will get a supercomputer with hybrid memory at their disposal
DailyTechInfo based on KurzweilAI: European neuroscience projects to benefit from hybrid supercomputer memoryIn order to be able to work effectively with large amounts of data that will be required for the calculations of the future most detailed models of the human brain created within the framework of the Human Brain and Blue Brain projects, specialists from IBM Research, the Swiss Federal Polytechnic University of Lausanne (Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH) in Zurich are working on creating a new hybrid memory system for a supercomputer that will be used in the above project.
We remind our readers that within the framework of the Blue Brain Project, it is planned to create the most detailed and detailed mathematical model of the human brain, which should be completed by 2023. Naturally, the basis of this mathematical model will be huge arrays of initial information, including data obtained experimentally and a large number of variable parameters describing the functioning of each individual neuron and the connections between them. The fundamental blocks of the future mathematical model are an accurate mathematical description of real neurons of various types, including even features such as size, shape and electrical properties.
Taking into account the fact that even in the human brain there are about 90 billion neurons, one can imagine how much information a mathematical model should operate in order to produce more or less realistic results. Now, researchers working within the framework of the Blue Brain Project are faced with a grandiose task to develop and create technical means capable of effectively operating with such large amounts of information that exceed the capabilities of existing information and computing systems.
"Such a complex system, which will intensively operate with big data, will be built on the basis of the most modern and powerful supercomputers that have sufficient performance," says Felix Schurmann, professor at EPFL, involved in the implementation of the Blue Brain project, "Now we are exploring the possibilities of using various types of computer memory and we evaluate them from the point of view of using the most complex brain model in calculations. But in the future, the technologies we have developed may find wider application."
For the Blue Brain project, an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer has already been purchased, which is installed at the CSCS computing center in Lugano, Switzerland. This supercomputer already has four times the amount of memory than the supercomputer that was used in the project up to that time, but this is still not enough to simulate the mouse brain with the highest level of detail.
Blue Brain project specialists, working together with specialists from the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), are combining various types of memory, RAM DRAM memory, which is the standard for all modern computers, and flash memory, which can store information even when the power is off.
The researchers plan to expand the capabilities of the existing supercomputer by providing it with 64 terabytes of RAM DRAM memory and 128 terabytes of flash memory, providing for the possibility of further volume expansion. In order to take full advantage of both types of memory, IBM specialists have developed a new architecture for a scalable supercomputer memory subsystem, EPFL and ETH Zurich are currently working on top-level software, thanks to which it will be possible to use hybrid memory as efficiently as possible in large-scale mathematical modeling and intensive supercomputer computing.
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