Title
A Low-Latency Communication Design for Brain Simulations
Abstract
Brain simulation, as one of the latest advances in artificial intelligence, facilitates better understanding about how information is represented and processed in the brain. The extreme complexity of the human brain makes brain simulations only feasible on high-performance computing platforms. Supercomputers with a large number of interconnected graphical processing units (GPUs) are currently employed for supporting brain simulations. Therefore, high-throughput low-latency inter-GPU communications in super-computers play a crucial role in meeting the performance requirements of brain simulation as a highly time-sensitive application. In this article, we first provide an overview of the current parallelizing technologies for brain simulations using multi-GPU architectures. Then we analyze the challenges to communications for brain simulation and summarize guidelines for communication design to address such challenges. Furthermore, we propose a partitioning algorithm and a two-level routing method to achieve efficient low-latency communications in multi-GPU architecture for brain simulation. We report experiment results obtained on a supercomputer with 2000 GPUs for simulating a brain model with 10 billion neurons (digital twin brain, DTB) to show that our approach can significantly improve communication performance. We also discuss open issues and identify some research directions for low-latency communication design for brain simulations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/MNET.008.2100447
IEEE Network
Keywords
DocType
Volume
low-latency communication design,brain simulation,high-performance computing platforms,supercomputers,graphical processing units,high-throughput low-latency inter-GPU communications,multiGPU architectures,two-level routing method,partitioning algorithm
Journal
36
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
0890-8044
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
5
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xin Du100.34
Yuhao Liu200.34
ZhiHui Lv311420.23
Qiang Duan432737.37
Jianfeng Feng564688.67
Jie Wu68817.16
Boyu Chen710.70
Qibao Zheng800.34