The 178th R-CCS Cafe - part 1

Whole-brain simulation allows us to understand full interactions among neurons and helps elucidate brain function and disease. However, it has not been realized due to the insufficient computational power of current supercomputers and lack of experimental data of the brain. In this study, we propose an efficient and scalable parallelization method for whole-brain simulation executed on next-generation supercomputers. We focus on the biological features of the brain that major brain parts of the cortex and cerebellum form layered sheet structure with local-dense and remote-sparse connections. To exploit the biological features, our proposed method combines tile-partitioning method and communication method using synaptic transmission delay. Our proposed method showed good weak scaling performance for simulation of the cortex, cerebellum, and cortico-cerebello-thalamo-cortical circuits on the K computer. These results suggest that the size of the model may scale to human brain size on Fugaku computer. The whole-brain simulation on next-generation supercomputers may lead to a new paradigm of brain research.