Neuromapp: A mini-application framework to improve neural simulators

Abstract

The increasing complexity and heterogeneity of extreme scale systems makes the optimization of large scale scientific applications particularly challenging. Efficiently leveraging these complex systems requires a great deal of technical expertise and a considerable amount of man-hours. The computational neuroscience community relies on an handful of those frameworks to model the electrical activity of brain tissue at different scales. As the members of the Blue Brain Project actively contribute to a large part of those frameworks, it becomes mandatory to implement a strategy to reduce the overall development cost. Therefore, we present Neuromapp, a computational neuroscience mini-application framework. Neuromapp consists of a number of mini-apps (small stand-alone applications) that represent a single functionality in one of the large scientific frameworks. The collection of several mini-apps forms a skeleton which is able to reproduce the original workflow of the scientific application. Thus, it becomes easy to investigate both single component and workflow optimizations, new software and hardware systems or future system design. New solutions can then be integrated into the large scientific applications if proved to be successful, reducing the overall development and optimization effort.