The Human Brain Project (HBP) is seeking High Performance Computing technology solutions in a new Pre-Commercial Procurement Call for Tender.
The mission of HBP’s High Performance Computing (HPC) Platform Subproject is to build the supercomputing and data hard and software infrastructure required to run cellular brain model simulations the size of a full human brain. This infrastructure will be made available to the HBP consortium and the wider community. The central element of the HPC Platform is the HBP Supercomputer, the project’s main production system located at Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Over the next decade, the HBP Supercomputer will be built in stages to arrive at the exascale capability needed for cellular simulations of the complete human brain. Large-scale brain simulations running on the future pre-exascale and exascale versions of the HBP Supercomputer will need to be interactively visualized and controlled by experimenters. “Interactive Supercomputing” capabilities will allow the supercomputer to be used like a scientific instrument, enabling in silico experiments on virtual human brains. These requirements will affect the whole system design, including the hardware architecture, run-time system, mode of operation, resource management and many other aspects.
The HBP PCP will acquire R&D of HPC system components that allow interactive visualization and steering of large-scale brain simulations on an HPC architecture capable of providing a floating-point peak performance up to 50 PFlop/s. Suppliers will be required to deliver pilot systems, demonstrating the readiness of the developed technologies and their integration into a scalable HPC architecture for a representative set of HBP use cases. The pilots should be deployed and operated as “pre-production” test systems at Jülich Supercomputing Centre.
The HBP PCP Call for Tender is now available for download (registration required).
