Whole brain simulator runs 100 trillion synapses on supercomputer
CerebroSim: Scalable Whole-Brain Simulator at 100-Trillion-Synapse Scale on the LineShine Supercomputer
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Summary
Simulating the entire human brain on computers is very hard because the brain has billions of neurons connected by trillions of tiny connections called synapses. The authors created CerebroSim, a tool that uses smart communication and memory strategies to efficiently simulate these connections at a huge scale. They ran CerebroSim on a massive supercomputer with millions of processor cores, simulating 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses while keeping the system fast and efficient. This approach can help scientists better understand brain disorders and test treatments using computer simulations.
What this means in practice
- •For medical simulation engineers: Simulate large-scale human brain models on supercomputers to test hypotheses about neural disorders and interventions.
- •For high performance computing teams: Optimize large-scale neural simulations by implementing delay-aware communication and lock-free multithreaded data delivery.
Authors
Guangnan Feng, Tianxiang Lyu, Hao Huang, Honghui Liang, Jingjing Li, Zhiguang Chen, Yutong Lu
Abstract
Building executable brain models is essential for moving neuroscience from description to mechanism and prediction. Human-brain-scale spiking simulation is constrained by highly irregular communication, multithreaded spike delivery, and the memory cost of sparse connectivity. We present CerebroSim, a scalable framework for whole-brain simulation. CerebroSim combines Delay-aware Spike Broadcast (DSB) for aggregated delay-aware communication, Race-free Synaptic Dynamics Computation (RSDC) for lock/atomic-free multithreaded delivery with HBM-aware optimization, and Sparse Synapse Storage Compression (3SC) for compact indexing with deterministic synapse regeneration. Using a model derived from magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion-weighted imaging, CerebroSim simulates 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses on 18,432 nodes across 11.2 million cores of the LineShine Supercomputer, sustaining 24.44 PFlop/s, 91% weak-scaling efficiency, and 94% strong-scaling efficiency. This capability makes biologically constrained human-brain models practical for mechanistic studies of brain disorders and controlled in silico testing of intervention hypotheses.