Seminar by Dr. Sandra Diaz

Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC)

Part I by Dr. Sandra Diaz: Simulating structural plasticity in large brain models - an engineer's perspective.
In this part of the talk Dr. Diaz will explain how they do simulations of structural changes in the brain and develop suitable software to do this. She will introduce structural plasticity in spiking neural networks and how this phenomenon can be addressed as an optimization or control problem. She will also show some applications of these simulations for the development of therapeutic protocols for diseases such as Parkinson's.

Part II by Dr. Thorster Hater: Arbor - an overview. This talk will introduce a new software framework developed within the Human Brain Project called Arbor. Arbor allows users to simulate morphologically detailed neurons and networks of them. Arbor is highly scalable and designed specifically to make the best use out of new computing hardware such as GPUs. Arbor currently scales to the whole JUWELS booster.

Within the talks they would like to discuss the possible connections to the molecular scale in order to create more realistic simulations which consider the relevant effects at the sub-cellular level in an efficient and scalable manner.