According to a new press release, “Hewlett Packard Enterprise today announced that the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s (EPFL) Blue Brain Project, a Swiss brain research initiative, selected HPE to build a next-generation supercomputer for modeling and simulation of the mammalian brain. The new supercomputer, called ‘Blue Brain 5′, will be dedicated to simulation neuroscience, in particular simulation-based research, analysis and visualization, to advance the understanding of the brain.”

The release goes on, “Brain disorders are complex phenomena spanning from genes to circuits to the whole brain. Establishing an integrated view of how all these levels work together and are perturbed in brain diseases is the primary challenge in understanding the brain. The Blue Brain Project is pioneering the approach of reconstructing and simulating digital models of brains to address this challenge. Blue Brain systematically releases open-access data, models and open-source tools to help the community, such as the European Human Brain Project, understand the brain at its different levels of organization.”

It continues, “Based on the supercomputing requirements derived from the project’s scientific roadmap, the Blue Brain Project followed a rigorous procurement process and after evaluation of the bids received, according to the published criteria, HPE was awarded a first contract at the end of 2017. Including a subsequent phase, the total value to provide state-of-the-art supercomputing technology and expertise can go up to CHF 18 million. The advanced supercomputer built by HPE is based on the HPE SGI 8600 System, providing tailored and scalable compute performance to enable the Blue Brain Project to pursue its scientific roadmap goal for 2020 to model entire regions of the mouse brain, in particular the thalamus and neocortex.”

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Photo credit: HPE