Looking Back at BrainScaleS CodeJam 2014

The 6th BrainScaleS CodeJam Workshop was held from 27 to 29 January at JSC with a focus on high-performance computing. To catalyse open-source collaborative software development in computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics, the CodeJam gathered researchers, students and engineers from seven countries (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, USA, and the Netherlands) to share ideas, present their work, and write code together.

With a total of 70 participants, the CodeJam #6 was the largest workshop in the series of BrainScaleS CodeJams. The workshop introduced the opportunities provided by JSC's supercomputers to an international audience from the computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics community. HPC hardware solutions for neuroscience such as the SpiNNaker architecture for modelling neural networks, massively parallel Blue Gene/Q architecture, and the Hybrid Multiscale Facility for neuromorphic computing were discussed, as well as HPC software solutions for neuroscientific applications (e.g., Pandas, Numba and others).

CodeJam #6 also covered other topics relevant to HPC, such as using Blue Gene Active Storage for neuroscience applications, HPC-capable neural simulators (e.g., NEST and NEURON), as well as neural modelling and simulation workflows. The workshop mornings were dedicated to talks on diverse HPC topics, leaving the afternoons for tutorials of choice (SpiNNaker, Python, C/C++, and PyPy) and code sprints, in which several smaller groups were spontaneously set up and got their hands dirty with code.
(Contact: Dr. Anne Do Lam, a.dolam@fz-juelich.de)