Optimizing NEURON brain simulator with Remote Memory Access on distributed memory systems

Abstract

The Complex neuronal network models require support from simulation environment for efficient network simulations. To compute the models increasing complexity necessitated the efforts to parallelize the NEURON simulation environment. The computational neuroscientists have extended NEURON by dividing the equations for its subnet among multiple processors for increasing the competence of hardware. For spiking neuronal networks inter-processor spikes exchange consume significant portion of overall simulation time on parallel machines. In NEURON Message Passing Interface (MPI) is used for inter processor spikes exchange, MPI_Allgather collective operation is used for spikes exchange generated after each interval across distributed memory systems. However, as the number of processors become larger and larger MPI_Allgather method become bottleneck and needs efficient exchange method to reduce the spike exchange time. This work has improved MPI_Allgather method to Remote Memory Access (RMA) based on MPI-3.0 for NEURON simulation environment, MPI based on RMA provides significant advantages through increased communication concurrency in consequence enhances efficiency of NEURON and scaling the overall run time for the simulation of large network models1.