EPFL Plans to Install a GPU-Accelerated Supercomputer for Brain Research

The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s (EPFL) Blue Brain Project, a Swiss brain research initiative, recently announced plans to install a new GPU-accelerated supercomputer designed for attaining a deeper understanding of the brain, in particular for simulation-based research, analysis and visualization.
Named, Blue Brain S, the new supercomputer will deliver 1.06 petaflops of peak performance. The system is equipped with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and is comprised of 372 compute nodes.  
“Brain disorders are complex phenomena spanning from genes to circuits to the whole brain. Establishing an integrated view of how all these levels work together and are perturbed in brain diseases is the primary challenge in understanding the brain,” the team wrote in a blog post.  “The Blue Brain Project is pioneering the approach of reconstructing and simulating digital models of brains to address this challenge.”

The computer is being designed and built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and is scheduled for completion in 2020.
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