Simulating Morphologically Detailed Neuronal Networks at Extreme Scale

Aleksandr Ovcharenko, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

The Blue Brain Project aims to simulate very large neuron networks, making optimal use of highly parallel supercomputing hardware. In order to achieve performance at scale, we have isolated and optimized the core simulation functionality of the robust and flexible NEURON simulator into new software called CoreNeuron. CoreNeuron has been developed with the goal of minimising memory footprint and maximising scalability. We present the scaling behavior and performance of CoreNeuron on up to 28 racks of IBM Blue Gene/Q, with one MPI process per node and 64 OpenMP threads per MPI process, comprising 458,752 cores and 1,835,008 threads at maximum.

Talk as pdf file