Thomas Lippert
Keynote lecture
Will talk about: Creating the HPC and Data Analytics Infrastructure for the Human Brain Project
Thomas Lippert has received his diploma in physics in 1987 with a study on supersymmetry from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He has completed doctoral theses at Wuppertal University, Germany, on simulations of lattice quantum chromodynamics in 1992, and at Groningen University, The Netherlands, on massively parallel computing with systolic algorithms in 1998. Thomas Lippert is director of the Institute for Advanced Simulation and head of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich, were he has created a simulation and data support laboratory for neuroscience together with colleagues from the institute for medicine. He is spokesman of the Programme on Supercomputing & Big Data in the research field Key Technologies of the German Helmholtz Association. He acts as executive director of the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) and he is chair of the German Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS); both institutions are responsible for the national provision of computer time in Germany. On the European level he is director of the HPC platform within the human brain flagship project (HBP), he coordinates the series of Europe-funded implementation projects for the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) as well as the exascale hardware projects DEEP and DEEP-ER. Thomas Lippert holds the chair for Computational Theoretical Physics at the University of Wuppertal. His research interests include high precision simulations of quark properties, gravitational anomalies in galaxies and beyond, numerical and parallel algorithms, cluster computing hardware and software, and quantum information processing.
HBP, the human brain project, is one of two European flagship projects foreseen to run for 10 years. The HBP aims at creating an open neuroscience driven infrastructure for simulation and big data aided modelling and research with a credible user program. The goal of the HBP is to progressively understand structure and functionality of the human brain, strongly based on a reverse engineering philosophy. In addition, it aims at advancements in digital computing by means of brain inspired algorithms with the potential to create completely novel analogue computing technology called neuromorphic computing. The HBP simulation and data analytics infrastructure will be based on a federation of supercomputer and data centers contributing to specific requirements of neuroscience in a complementary manner. It will encompass a variety of simulation services and data analytics services ranging from the molecular level towards synaptic and neuronal levels up to cognitive and robotic models. The major challenge is that HBP research will require exascale capabilities for computing, data integration and data analytics. Mastering these challenges amounts to a huge interdisciplinary software and hardware co-design effort including neuroscientists, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists on an international scale. The HBP is a long-term endeavor and thus puts large emphasis on educational and training aspects. The maturity of a service is critical, and it is important to differentiate between an early prototype, the development phase, and the delivery of services, in order to assess capability levels. The services and infrastructures of the HBP will successively include more European partners, in particular PRACE sites and EUDAT data services, and will be made available step by step to the neuroscience and computer science community.
