Sandra Diaz Gives Inspiring Talk at SC23
Sandra Diaz, head of the Simulation and Data Lab Neuroscience at JSC, was invited to give a talk about “Boosting Neuroscience Research with High-Performance Computing Infrastructure” at SC23. Under this year’s tagline “I am HPC”, Sandra Diaz shared her personal journey, which took her on an unconventional path before she finally joined JSC nine years ago. She then presented the journey of the neuroscience community on its path to becoming more HPC-oriented. Neuroscience has become a highly interdisciplinary research field, which involves purely experimental studies, applied technology development, mathematical theory, computational models and simulations, AI, visualization, and data analysis. However, neuroscience is relatively new to the usage of high-performance computing. Within the EU-funded, Human Brain Project, which was successfully concluded recently, scientists from all over Europe have made substantial progress in consolidating the computational requirements and usage patterns of this heterogeneous field. Alongside the evolution of the European HPC landscape, neuroscience has also helped co-design federated access to HPC, the cloud, and data resources through the ICEI project in collaboration with the Fenix Research Infrastructure – a European effort to provide federated access to some of the largest HPC centres in Europe.
In her talk, Sandra Diaz emphasized how the relationship between neuroscience and HPC has evolved in the past decade. She also gave examples of scientific highlights that have been enabled through this interaction as well as offering a perspective of how neuroscience can contribute to future technology co-design while maintaining a focus on societal impact. She concluded her talk by highlighting the importance of community, networking, and inclusivity in the adoption and future development of HPC. This very inspiring talk in the largest conference room at SC23 was well attended and well received.
The talk is available on YouTube.
Contact: Dr. Sandra Diaz
from JSC News No. 300, 12 December 2023