Performance Analysis of Accelerated Biophysically-Meaningful Neuron Simulations
Paper in proceeding, 2016

In-vivo and in-vitro experiments are routinely used in neuroscience to unravel brain functionality. Although they are a powerful experimentation tool, they are also time-consuming and, often, restrictive. Computational neuroscience attempts to solve this by using biologically-plausible and biophysically-meaningful neuron models, most prominent among which are the conductance-based models. Their computational complexity calls for accelerator-based computing to mount large-scale or real-time neuroscientific experiments. In this paper, we analyze and draw conclusions on the class of conductance models by using a representative modeling application of the inferior olive (InfOli), an important part of the olivocerebellar brain circuit. We conduct an extensive profiling session to identify the computational and data-transfer requirements of the application under various realistic use cases. The application is, then, ported onto two acceleration nodes, an Intel Xeon Phi and a Maxeler Vectis Data Flow Engine (DFE). We evaluate the performance scalability and resource requirements of the InfOli application on the two target platforms. The analysis of InfOli, which is a real-life neuroscientific application, can serve as a useful guide for porting a wide range of similar workloads on platforms like the Xeon Phi or the Maxeler DFEs. As accelerators are increasingly populating High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, the current paper provides useful insight on how to optimally use such nodes to run complex and relevant neuron modeling workloads.

Computer Science

Engineering

Author

G. Smaragdos

G. Chatzikostantis

S. Nomikou

D. Rodopoulos

Ioannis Sourdis

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

D. Soudris

C. I. de Zeeuw

C. Strydis

2016 Ieee International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software Ispass 2016

1-11
978-1-5090-1953-3 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1109/ISPASS.2016.7482069

ISBN

978-1-5090-1953-3

More information

Latest update

3/2/2022 6