Stefan Eileman (Polytechnic Federal School, Lausanne, Switzerland) presents his research interest in the Blue Brain and Human Brain Projects.

The Blue Brain Project and the Human Brain Project build and simulate realistic models of brain tissue. Scaling this to the human brain represents a “grand challenge” science use case to drive the technological development of supercomputing hardware to the exascale and give guidance for the necessary software components for operating such supercomputers as scientific instruments.

High Performance Computing is facing multiple technical challenges, such as a “power wall”, a “memory wall” and a “parallelism wall”. Proven paradigms, best practices and software packages have to be re-thought to overcome those obstacles. In this process, other innovative areas such as Big Data, Gaming and others will help to modernize HPC upon a foundation of novel building blocks for future systems.

We will present our and our partner’s visualization software and hardware infrastructure, engineering efforts and future plans. We will motivate our current vision for Interactive Supercomputing and High-Performance Visualization to encourage collaboration with the visualization and HPC communities.