HBP

Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century. The Human Brain Project (HBP) is building EBRAINS, a sustainable research infrastructure to help advance neuroscience, medicine and computing. As one of the first two FET Flagships, it is one of the largest scientific projects ever funded by the European Union. The Flagship initiative was launched in 2013 and has the potential to revolutionise the future of neuroscience, medicine, and computing.

The HBP is funded in multiple phases. The work carried out in each of the phases is defined in Specific Grant Agreements (SGA). During the first two phases, six ICT Platforms have been developed, driven by the requirements of the neuroscientists working in HBP. In turn, these neuroscientists were the first to use the new tools and services, before they were made available to the European and world-wide research community (e-infrastructure services are provided by the ICEI project which is building the Fenix infrastructure). The Platforms have been further advanced and integrated into EBRAINS (an early version of which was called “HBP Joint Platform”), which is an infrastructure for the entire neuroscience community with a central web portal and a High-Level Support Team as single face to the user community. SGA3 is the last project phase under the umbrella of the Flagship project, in which EBRAINS will be advanced and improved, so that it will remain as an infrastructure for neuroscience research also beyond the end of the Flagship era.