PSNC Seminar: dr Francesco Simula – “Distributed and Plastic Spiking Neural Network model of the brain cortex behavior (TEXTAROSSA)”

2022-02-19

PSNC Seminar: dr Francesco Simula – “Distributed and Plastic Spiking Neural Network model of the brain cortex behavior (TEXTAROSSA)”
We warmly invite you to the 7th edition of the PSNC seminars, which will take place on February 21, 2022 at 2:30 PM. The lecture entitled: “Distributed and Plastic Spiking Neural Network model of the brain cortex behavior (TEXTAROSSA)” will be given by dr Francesco Simula from Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy.

The moderator of the meeting, organized as part of the series of PSNC open seminars “Challenges for the IT infrastructure of science in the era of digital transformation”, will be Tomasz Piontek Director of PSNC Applications Division.

The meeting will be organized on the Webex platform on February 21, 2022 at 2:30 PM.

 

The seminar is focused, besides a short introduction of the APE Group and of its research activities in hardware and software pursued in its history , with an emphasis on those that pertain to the neural network simulations. Special attention will be given to:

• the neural network simulator (DPSNN) we developed in-house;
• its results as a scientific tool in investigating the Slow-Waves Activity during deep sleep and memory consolidation;
• its results as a benchmark software, with a focus on scaling performances, power consumption and networking infrastructure on standard and HPC platforms;
• moving our know-how onto other neural simulating platforms as the NEST Simulator and NeuronGPU – this latter a software similar to NEST but GPU-accelerated.

 

Francesco Simula received his Master’s Degree in Theoretical Physics in 2006 from University Sapienza in Rome, Italy with a thesis regarding spin glass simulations performed on the massively parallel computers designed by the APE Group, the supercomputing initiative internal to Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). Since 2006, he has worked at the Department of Physics of University Sapienza as temporary research fellow and then for INFN as developer of high performance numerical simulation of scientifically interesting codes. Paralled computing is his main research interest, focusing on high performance networking and GPU acceleration on both HPC and embedded systems.