Right before the Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO, I participated in a workshop titled OpenPOWER Academic Discussion Group. In it, academics invested in the OpenPOWER platform came together to present their current work and what the architecture holds for the future. Since I’m part of the POWER Acceleration and Design Centre and have hands-on experience in administrating JURON (our IBM POWER8’ Minsky server), it was a good occasion to present news from Jülich.

My talk, Brain Research Applications on Minsky, covers a selection of applications running on JURON from the neuroscience community. JURON was acquired as a pre-commercial procurement system in the scope of the Human Brain Project, so it makes sense to use this as a POWER use-case.

For the talk I read some background on the history of brain research, since neuroscience is not my research field at all. I also spoke to colleagues of mine involved in neuroscientific applications using JURON. They were so kind to provide me with content I could use and offered time to chat about neuroscience in general and their applications specifically. I picked applications which participated in our GPU Hackathon at the beginning of this year, since I already knew a few things about then.1

In the end, this was quite a novel experience, talking about other people’s research from a field I know little about. I did my best and hope everything turned out well. Personally, I think it went alright!

Also this talk is available at JuSER, locally here, or embedded below. Since I needed to think carefully what I was going to say about each slide, I took some notes to guide my words. Based on this, there’s a version of the slides appended by notes, thanks to the \note{} LaTeX Beamer feature.

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  1. I have not written about the GPU Hackathon here, have I? Damn. I wrote something in Jülich’s blogs, though. ↩