New Division "HPC in Neuroscience" at JSC

A new division, HPC in Neuroscience, was established at JSC in March of this year to strengthen and focus JSC's activities at the interface of computational neuroscience and high-performance computing. These activities include major contributions to the Helmholtz portfolio theme "Supercomputing and Modelling for the Human Brain (SMHB)", through which the division receives the majority of its funding, and to the "Human Brain Project (HBP)", one of two European FET Flagships recently selected by the European Commission. The division is headed by Dr. Boris Orth.

Within the portfolio theme SMHB and the HBP in particular, but also in local projects and within JARA-HPC, the division works closely with groups from the neighbouring Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM) at Jülich and with the Virtual Reality Group at RWTH Aachen University. It hosts the new Simulation Lab Neuroscience under the scientific direction of Prof. Abigail Morrison (INM/IAS), which was founded in January to support the neuroscience community in leveraging HPC resources for their research. As the first Bernstein Facility for Simulation and Database Technology, this SimLab contributes its expertise to the National Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience, Germany.

The division carries out research and development in the fields of data analysis, modelling, simulation, visualization and HPC methods in computational neuroscience, and supports the neuroscience community in these fields through the Simulation Lab Neuroscience. Additional planned focus areas include data management, hardware co-design work with the JSC's Exascale Labs, and the use of special HPC architectures for computational neuroscience. Finally, the division coordinates the portfolio theme SMHB and manages the High-Performance Computing Platform sub-project of the Human Brain Project.
(Contact: Dr. Boris Orth, b.orth@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News No. 212, 13 May 2013