A Brainy Simulations

How do the human brain's trillion cells regulate and control how people perceive, learn, reason, communicate and act? Integrating research on the brain, probably the most complex system in existence, is the goal of the Human Brain Project, a multi-agency research initiative coordinated through the National Institutes of Health.

As part of this effort, researchers at PSC and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland are developing NEOSIM, a set of efficient, portable software tools for large-scale modeling of the nervous system. NEOSIM provides a framework to integrate computational models from the sub-cellular to whole-brain level. To effectively exploit advanced parallel computing, NEOSIM uses discrete event-simulation techniques to optimize the teamwork of many processors working on separable parts of a large-scale task. This image represents two layers of simulated neurons, with color indicating how NEOSIM would distribute them over six processing nodes.