Watch magazine for innovation and technology: the supercomputer decrypts the brain

HPE developed Blue Brain 5 to support the various computation-intensive challenges of Blue Brain Project reconstruction and simulation workflows. The flexible architecture of the HPE SGI 8600 system is essential for the purpose of the project, as it can accommodate a variety of subsystems specifically designed for tasks such as visualization or in-depth learning that work together as a single system. Blue Brain 5 incorporates four different subsystems – each optimized for a different load profile – that have specific strengths such as memory speed, graphics, processor speed, and I / O.

"Technology supercomputers are available, "explains Felix Schürmann, co-director of the Blue Brain Project:" If we model a single neuron with Blue Brain today, that equates to about 20,000 ordinary differential equations. quickly to 100 billion equations that need to be solved simultaneously. HPE helps us find the right path in a complex technological environment.

The HPE SGI 8600 supercomputer used by the Blue Brain project includes 372 compute nodes providing optimal performance of 1.06 petaflops. The system has 94 terabytes of memory – the memory equivalent of about 23,000 laptops – and runs on the Intel Xeon Gold 6140 and Intel Xeon Phi 7230 processors as well as on the NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processors . The system utilizes Mellanox's one- and two-rail InfiniBand high-performance networks and has four petabytes of high-performance DataDirect Networks (DDD) storage with over 50 GB / s bandwidth combined with DDN's Infinite Memory Engine (IME), an innovative flash memory. Burst buffer with 80 GB / s bandwidth.

The HPE SGI 8600 system is designed to solve the most complex problems. The system is the basis of some of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Blue Brain can scale up to thousands of computer nodes. The system features an energy-efficient liquid cooling system that does not provide hot air to the data center. The new system was installed at the Swiss National Computing Center (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland.