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Supercomputing
Building models of the complete human brain will require supercomputers more than a thousand times more powerful than today’s largest machines. Providing this power will be the task of a new Facility for High Performance Computing. As the HBP’s modeling effort comes closer to simulating the complete human brain, it will need dedicated access to progressively larger scale systems. Building such computers will demand new solutions for energy consumption, data transmission, resilience, programmability and interactivity, as well as completely new kinds of functionality. A particularly important requirement is interactivity, so that users can engage in real time with data, model building, simulations, visualization, and analysis. The HBP’s strategy will be to find the best combination of existing and new hardware components from computer manufacturers and to drive the development of the middleware and other software needed to make the new systems useful and usable. The first task of the new Facility will be to work with manufacturers to explore possible hardware configurations. On this basis, the Facility will proceed to build a customized system that can scale to exascale levels of data storage and processing. In a longer-term perspective, the facility will investigate ways of exploiting the organizing principles of the brain in future supercomputers.