An Italian consortium is participating in an ambitious project to create the world’s most detailed model of the human brain, and it has already made several scientific breakthroughs through the use of high-performance computing.

The initiative is being led by Cineca, the largest Italian computing center and one of the most important worldwide. Its work on the human brain has resulted in early development of a new treatment for control of blood pressure, an epilepsy model, and a potential implant for recovering from loss of sight.

“We’re enabling scientific discovery by means of providing and co-designing the most advanced HPC systems to promote and support excellence in science as part of the European HPC ecosystem,” said Sanzio Bassini (pictured), head of high-performance computing at Cineca. “The Human Brain Project utilizes HPC systems to meet the requirements of the community.”

Bassini spoke with Lisa Martin, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed how Cineca leverages Dell Technologies Inc.’s technology to meet its demanding compute needs, the scope of the Human Brain Project and the value of the European community’s focus on the HPC field. (* Disclosure below.)

Big data processing

The work of Cineca and its nation-state partners is ideally suited to the capabilities provided by HPC architectures. The project requires an ability to perform massive data analytics, and Dell supplies EMC PowerEdge servers, using Intel Corp.’s Xeon Platinum processors and Intel Optane memory to meet this need.

“In our computing architectures, we had to address capabilities facing big data processing and also provide cloud access to the system,” Bassini explained. “We needed a system that could manage, in a holistic approach, the data processing, integration with cloud computing services, and the opportunity to be connected with HPC systems in Europe. Dell showed characteristics of the solution that would be more compliant and flexible with respect to combinations of different constraints and requirements.”

Cineca has 4,000 projects in its infrastructure, and its HPC network is viewed as among the most powerful computing systems in the world. Yet, in an ironic twist, Bassini noted that HPC has competition from a formidable competitor – the human brain itself. The challenge is to use HPC to replicate the same kind of interconnections made possible through human ingenuity.

“From the point of view of computational performance, the human brain is more than an exascale system, but with energy consumption that is very low,” Bassini said. “If we could organize the technology of HPC in terms of interconnections, now we’re morphing computing systems and expectations that we can build a system to provide computational power at a level that would represent a tremendous step ahead.”

As the head of HPC at Cineca, Bassini has gained his own perspective on the growth of the HPC field and opportunities for other countries and institutions to capitalize on continued advances in a dynamic field.

“There are federal labs in the U.S., main nation model centers in Europe, big facilities in Japan, and large universities in China,” Bassini said. “There is a continuous sharing of knowledge, experience and best practices. Know-how has been accumulated by some facilities and institutions around the world.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE