EBRAINS Shares Access to Improved Laptop-to-Supercomputer Brain Simulator

September 16, 2021

Sept. 16, 2021 — EBRAINS, the new digital research infrastructure set up by the EU-funded Human Brain Project, has made available an enhanced brain simulation software, NEST 3, with wide practical use in fields such as neuroscience and robotics. NEST 3 enables a better representation of entire populations of neurons and offers an optimized simulator performance.

Adaptable and user-friendly, NEST 3 serves different users, from student researchers with laptops to established scientists with access to supercomputers. Dedicated developer efforts during the Human Brain Project have prepared NEST 3 for the new era of ultrafast exascale supercomputers. Continuously developed since 1995 by a growing developer community, NEST 3 highlights a long-term commitment to rigorous quality control in scientific software development.

“NEST is the leading tool for neuronal network simulation focusing on network dynamics and a reference tool in its field. The combination of the NEST 3 simulator, NESTML modeling language and the NEST Desktop user interface provides a powerful combination of tools for cutting edge neuroscience and education,” said Hans Ekkehard Plesser, President of the NEST Initiative and Leader of the EBRAINS High-Level Support Team.

What’s New

NEST 3 boosts the productivity of brain scientists by making it much easier to construct complex network models in the computer. Using NEST 3 a single line of code can achieve what required dozens of lines of code in earlier versions. This allows researchers to explore a wide range of model variants and makes it easier to validate models, contributing reliable and reproducible research. Performance improvements enable ever larger simulations including the efficient storage of steadily growing amounts of simulation data.

NEST Desktop

Future brain researchers will grasp the nature of brain models faster using NEST Desktop, the powerful graphical interface to brain simulations with NEST. Originally conceived and trialled as a teaching tool at the University of Freiburg, NEST Desktop has matured to production use through a Human Brain Project partnering project and is now available as an online tool on EBRAINS.

NESTML

The NESTML modeling language allows scientists to easily extend NEST with new models of nerve cells and connections between them. They can thus benefit the well-established reliability of the NEST simulator while exploring new ideas and concepts in brain science. This not only improves the quality of research but also eases the sharing of new brain models with other scientists.

NEST Server

Released together with NEST 3, NEST Server provides a flexible but secure interface to the NEST simulator kernel, allowing NEST to provide simulation services to NEST Desktop and the EBRAINS Neurorobotics Platform as well as enabling large-scale NEST simulations on HPC systems from the EBRAINS Collaboratory.

Why NEST?

NEST is a command line tool for simulating neural networks. It allows users to build networks of model neurons inside a computer and simulate it. By modifying neurons and the connections between them, scientists can explore how the properties of the network elements influence its activity. NEST focuses on the dynamics, size and structure of neural systems, rather than on the exact morphology of individual neurons. This allows modelling extremely large systems to observe how complex networks behave under different conditions, while retaining cellular resolution. It is ideal for networks of any size and is openly available to download. Find out more here: https://ebrains.eu/service/nest-simulator.

User Stories

NEST has been used to create some of the largest anatomically constrained brain models in neuroscience today, including:

  • Microcircuit model — In 2014, PhD student Tobias Potjans and his supervisor Markus Diesmann published a model of a minimal building block of cortex, a microcircuit model, based on careful analysis of anatomical data. By sharing their model as a NEST implementation, they encouraged researchers to build directly on their work resulting in numerous scientific publications. This microcircuit model comprising approximately 77,000 neurons is freely available for anyone to explore through EBRAINS.
  • Multi-area model — The power of NEST to simulate significant parts of a brain is demonstrated by a 2018 model of the entire visual cortex of the macaque monkey. Including 32 brain areas with a total of over 4 million neurons, the multi-area model by Max Schmidt, Sacha van Albada and colleagues represents the state of the art in anatomically grounded brain models. Both the model itself and the complex workflows required to analyze its dynamics have been carefully reviewed and documented and are freely available as references and the starting point of future research.

Work within the Human Brain Project has further expanded the user groups of NEST:

  • Multiscale simulations On EBRAINS, researchers can connect NEST to a macroscopic whole brain simulation engine, “The Virtual Brain”, which is used in medical research to model brain diseases. The resulting multiscale simulations provide a path to investigate how phenomena on the microscale and macroscale of the brain are linked.
  • Neurorobotics — NEST brain models are well suited to link neuroscience to technology research. On the EBRAINS research infrastructure, scientists can use the Neurorobotics Platform to connect NEST to virtual robots to test how brain models can respond to sensory input to control robot actions.

Community

Nearly 50 developers from four continents contributed to the release of NEST 3. Its development started in 2016, with teams from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, and the Research Centre Jülich, Germany as major contributors. NEST development is representative of the collaborative approach that EBRAINS fosters.

About EBRAINS

EBRAINS is a new digital research infrastructure, created by the EU-funded Human Brain Project, that gathers an extensive range of data and tools for brain related research. EBRAINS aims to help translate the latest scientific discoveries into innovation in medicine and industry, for the benefit of patients and society. It draws on cutting-edge neuroscience. Apart from simulation tools such as NEST, EBRAINS also offers an extensive range of brain data sets, a multilevel brain atlas, modelling tools, and easy access to high-performance computing resources as well as to robotics and neuromorphic platforms. EBRAINS has been recognised as one of the best-in-class European research infrastructures and included in the ESFRI roadmap 2021. Find out more here: https://ebrains.eu/news/ebrains-selected-for-esfri-roadmap.


Source: Human Brain Project

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

High-Performance Storage for AI and Analytics Panel

October 31, 2024

When storage is mentioned in an AI or Big Data analytics context, it is assumed to be a high-performance system. In practice, it may not be, and the user eventually learns about scaleable storage as the amounts of data g Read more…

White House Mulls Expanding AI Chip Export Bans Beyond China

October 31, 2024

The Biden administration is reportedly considering capping sales of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips from US-based manufacturers like AMD and Nvidia to certain countries, including those in the Middle East. � Read more…

Lottery to Determine Major AI Conference Attendees Amid Registration Boom

October 31, 2024

A boom in AI has created a problem for the organizers of the NeurIPS conference, which is considered an essential machine-learning research conference. The sheer number of registrations has overwhelmed organizers, who Read more…

Role Reversal: Google Teases Nvidia’s Blackwell as It Softens TPU Rivalry

October 30, 2024

Customers now have access to Google's homegrown hardware -- its Axion CPU and latest Trillium TPU -- in its Cloud service.  At the same time, Google gave customers a teaser on Nvidia's Blackwell coming to Google Cloud, Read more…

AI Has a Data Problem, Appen Report Says

October 30, 2024

AI may be a priority at American companies, but the difficulty in managing data and obtaining high quality data to train AI models is becoming a bigger hurdle to achieving AI aspirations, according to Appen’s State of Read more…

Microsoft Azure & AMD Solution Channel

Join Microsoft Azure and AMD at SC24

Atlanta, Georgia is the place to be this fall as the high-performance computing (HPC) community convenes for Supercomputing 2024. SC24 will bring together an unparalleled mix of scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, and developers for a week of learning and sharing. Read more…

Report from HALO Details Issues Facing HPC-AI Industry

October 28, 2024

Intersect360 Research has released a comprehensive new report concerning the challenges facing the combined fields of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Titled “Issues Facing the HPC-AI Read more…

High-Performance Storage for AI and Analytics Panel

October 31, 2024

When storage is mentioned in an AI or Big Data analytics context, it is assumed to be a high-performance system. In practice, it may not be, and the user eventu Read more…

Shutterstock_556401859

Role Reversal: Google Teases Nvidia’s Blackwell as It Softens TPU Rivalry

October 30, 2024

Customers now have access to Google's homegrown hardware -- its Axion CPU and latest Trillium TPU -- in its Cloud service.  At the same time, Google gave custo Read more…

AI Has a Data Problem, Appen Report Says

October 30, 2024

AI may be a priority at American companies, but the difficulty in managing data and obtaining high quality data to train AI models is becoming a bigger hurdle t Read more…

Report from HALO Details Issues Facing HPC-AI Industry

October 28, 2024

Intersect360 Research has released a comprehensive new report concerning the challenges facing the combined fields of high-performance computing (HPC) and artif Read more…

Archetype AI’s Newton Model Masters Physics From Raw Data

October 28, 2024

Physicists have developed a deep understanding of the fundamental laws of nature through careful observations, experiments, and precise measurements. However, w Read more…

PNNL-Microsoft Collaborate on Cloud Computing for Chemistry, More to Come

October 25, 2024

RICHLAND, Wash.—Some computing challenges are so big that it’s necessary to go all in. That’s the approach a diverse team of scientists and computing expe Read more…

Xeon 6 vs. Zen-5 HPC Benchmark Showdown

October 24, 2024

In this GPU age, CPUs are often considered second citizens because most of the performance comes from the GPU. In most systems, GPUs are separate PCIe devices u Read more…

Nvidia’s Newest Foundation Model Can Actually Spell ‘Strawberry’

October 23, 2024

A new AI model from Nvidia knows just how many R’s are in the word strawberry, a feat that OpenAI’s GPT-4o model has yet to achieve. In what is known as the Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire