TY  - CONF
AU  - Kunkel, Susanne
AU  - Schmidt, Maximilian
AU  - Eppler, Jochen Martin
AU  - Igarashi, Jun
AU  - Masumoto, Gen
AU  - Fukai, Tomoki
AU  - Ishii, Shin
AU  - Plesser, Hans Ekkehard
AU  - Morrison, Abigail
AU  - Diesmann, Markus
AU  - Helias, Moritz
TI  - Supercomputers ready for use as discovery machines for neuroscience
M1  - FZJ-2013-03826
PY  - 2013
AB  - NEST is a widely used tool to simulate biological spiking neural networks [1]. The simulator is subject tocontinuous development, which is driven by the requirements of the current neuroscientific questions. Atpresent, a major part of the software development focuses on the improvement of the simulator'sfundamental data structures in order to enable brain-scale simulations on supercomputers such as theBlue Gene system in Jülich and the K computer in Kobe. Based on our memory-usage model [2], weredesigned the neuronal and the connection infrastructure of NEST such that networks of 10^8 neuronsand 10^12 synapses can be simulated on the K computer [3]. These improvements reduce the memoryfootprint without compromising on the simulator's general usability and user interface. Here, we describethe recent technological advances which enable NEST to achieve high performance and good scaling ofnetwork setup and simulation on the K computer and on the Blue Gene system. We demonstrate that theusability of these machines for network simulations has become comparable to running simulations on asingle PC.
T2  - 10th Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society
CY  - 13 Mar 2013 - 18 Mar 2013, Goettingen (Germany)
Y2  - 13 Mar 2013 - 18 Mar 2013
M2  - Goettingen, Germany
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)24
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/137379
ER  -